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MY COUNTRY'S PART 



MY COUNTRY'S PART 



BY 

MARY SYNON 



ILLUSTRATED 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

CHICAGO NEW YORK SAN FRANCISCO 






V 



Copyright, 1918, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



JUL 27 1918 




'CI.A5013(J8 



3 



TO 

THOMAS S. ENRIGHT 

JAMES B. GRESHAM 

MARLE B. HAY 

PRIVATES IN THE RANKS OF 

THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES 

WHO WERE THE FIRST TO DIE IN FRANCE 

IN OUR WAR AGAINST GERMANY 

THIS BOOK 
IS DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. "My Grandmother and Myself" ... 1 

II. The United States and the World War 40 

III. What the Great War Really Means . 53 

IV. How THE War Came to the United 

States 65 

V. How the United States Went into War 77 

VI. What the United States Is Doing in 

THE War 85 

VII. Rear-Line Trenches 93 

VIII. The American's Part 110 

IX. The United States and Individual 

Freedom 121 

X. The United States and International 

Peace 131 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



General Pershing's veterans direct from the trenches in 
France marching to the City Hall, New York City 

Frontispiece v^ 

FACING PAGE 

Belgium refugees between Malines and Brussels ... 66 -^ 



President Wilson delivering his war message . . . 80 ^, 

Recruits of the National Army waiting at the booths of a 

National Army cantonment 90 ^ 

Children selling thrift stamps 104 y 

Boys at work in their war garden 110, 

The launching of the IT. S. S. Accoma 118 , 

An immigrant family qualified to enter the United States 128 '•' 



CHAPTER I 

"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 

What can an American boy or an American 
girl do for our country? 

The ways are many. Every man, woman, 
and child in the United States has the duty of 
defending the nation. In time of war every 
American must be in spirit, if he cannot be in 
actual duty, a soldier. A soldier's part is to 
guard his nation. An American's part is to 
guard America. The guarding may be done 
by saving the food that the government asks 
its citizens to save, by buying War Thrift 
Stamps, by buying Liberty Bonds, by working 
for the Red Cross, or for other patriotic organ- 
izations; but it must be done with the idea that 
our country is our first concern, our first care. 

Every American must be watchful for his 
country's welfare. How may he do this duty.^ 
By remembering always that he is, first of all. 



2 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

an American. No matter what country his 
father or mother, or grandfather or grandmother 
came from, he is American, with the rights and 
privileges and obhgations of his citizenship. 
And he must have no divided allegiance. 

The story of what one American boy could 
do for his country is told in the story that 
follows. Some people call this a fiction story. 
But the root of it is truth. For every boy and 
every girl in the United States can hold to the 
love of country that John Sutton's grandmother 
put into his soul through the incidents that 
make up the tale of 

*'My Grandmother and Myself" 

My grandmother was at the basement win- 
dow, peering into the street as if she were 
watching for some one, when I came home from 
school. "Is that you, John?" she asked me 
as I stood in the hall stamping the snow from 
my boots. "Sure!" I called to her. "Who'd 
you think I was.^^ A spirit.^" 

She laughed a little as I went into the room 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 3 

and flung down my books. My grandmother 
hasn't seen any one in ten years, though she 
sits day after day looking out on the street as 
if a parade were passing; but she knows the 
thump of my books on the table as well as she 
knows the turning of my father's key in the 
lock of the door. "'Tis a lively spirit you'd 
make, Shauneen," she said, with that chuckle 
she saves for me. *'No, 'twas your father I 
thought was coming." 

"What'd he be doing home at this time.^^" 

*' These are queer days," she said, "and 
there are queer doings in them." 

"There's nothing queer that I can see," I 
told her. 

"I'm an old, blind woman," she said, "but 
sometimes I see more than do they who have 
the sight of their two eyes." She said it so 
solemnly, folding her hands one over the other 
as she drew herself up in her chair, that I felt 
a little thrill creeping up my spine. "What do 
you mean.''" I asked her. "Time'U tell you," 
she said. 



4 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

My mother came in from the kitchen then. 
"Norah forgot to order bacon for the morning," 
she said. "Will you go to the market, John, 
before you do anything else.^^" 

"Oh, I'm going skating," I protested. 

"It won't take you five minutes," said my 
mother. She seemed tired and worried. The 
look in her eyes made me feel that there was 
trouble hanging over the house. My mother 
isn't like my grandmother. When things go 
wrong, my grandmother stands up straight, 
and throws back her shoulders, and fronts ahead 
as if she were a general giving orders for at- 
tack; but my mother wilts like a hurt flower. 
She was drooping then while she stood in the 
room, so I said, "All right, I'll go," though 
I'd promised the fellows to come to the park 
before four o'clock. 

"And look in at the shop as you go by," 
my grandmother said, "and see if your father's 
there now." 

"Why shouldn't he be?" my mother asked. 

There was a queer sound in her voice that 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 5 

urged me around past my father's shop. My 
father was there in the Httle office, going over 
blue-prints with Joe Krebs's uncle and Mattie 
Kleiner's father and a big man I'd never seen 
before. I told my grandmother when I went 
home. "I knew it," she said. "I knew it. 
And I dreamed last night of my cousin Michael 
who died trying to escape from Van Diemen's 
Land." 

"You knew what.^^" I asked her, for again 
that strange way of hers sent shivery cold over 
me. 

"Go to your skating," she bade me. 

There wasn't much skating at Tompkins 
Square, though, when I found the crowd. The 
sun had come out strong in the afternoon and 
the ice was melting. "Ground-hog must have 
seen his shadow last week," Bennie Curtis said. 
All the fellows — Joe Carey and Jim Dean and 
Frank Belden and Joe Krebs and Mattie Kleiner 
and Fred Wendell and the rest of them — had 
taken off their skates and were starting a tug 



6 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

of war in the slush. Mattie Kleiner was the 
captain on one side and Frank Belden the cap- 
tain on the other. Mattie had chosen Joe 
Krebs and Jim Dean and Joe Carey on his side. 
Just as I came along he shouted that he chose 
me. Frank Belden yelled that it was his choice 
and that he'd take me. "He don't want to be 
on your side!" Mattie cried. "He's with the 
Germans !" 

"Well, I guess not," I said, "any more than 
I'm with the English. I'm an American." 

"You can't be just an American in this 
battle," Frank Belden said. 

"Then I'll stay out of it," I told him. 

They all started to yell "Neutral!" and 
"Fraid cat!" and "Oh, you dove of peace!" 
at me. I got tired of it after a while, and I 
went after Mattie hard. When I'd finished 
with him he bawled at me: "Wait till your 
father knows, he'll fix you !" 

"What for?" I jeered. 

"For going against his principles, that's 
what," Mattie Kleiner roared. 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 7 

*'I'd like to know what you know about 
my father's principles." I laughed at him. 

"Well, I ought to know," he cried. "I 
heard him take the oath." 

"What oath?" we all demanded, but Mattie 
went off in surly silence. Joe Krebs and Joe 
Carey trailed after him. I stayed with the 
other fellows until it was dark. Then I started 
for home. 

Joe Carey was waiting for me at the corner. 
"Do you believe him, John.^^" he asked me. 
"Do you believe Mattie about the oath.^^" 

"How's that.^" I parried. I seemed to 
remember having heard a man who'd been at 
the house a fortnight before whispering some- 
thing about an oath, and I knew that I'd heard 
my mother say to my grandmother: "I pray 
to God he'll get in no trouble with any oaths or 
promises." I kept wondering if Mattie Kleiner's 
father and Joe Krebs's uncle and the big man 
with the blue-prints who'd been in my father's 
shop had anything to do with it. "Oh, Mattie's 
talking in his sleep," I said. 



8 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

"Well, maybe," said Joe Carey; "but 
he wasn't sleeping the night they had the 
meeting in his house. He was on the stairs 
going up to the top floor, and he kept the 
door open a little way and he heard every- 
thing they said, and nobody at all knew he 
was there." 

Joe Carey's eyes were almost popping out 
of his head, and so I knew that Mattie had been 
telling him a long story. "I guess he didn't 
hear very much," I said. 

"You bet he did," Joe declared. "He heard 
them reading the letters telling people not to 
go on the ships because they were going to be 
sunk, and he heard them talking about bombs 
and munition factories. He says that he heard 
your father say that he'd gladly lay down his 
life for the sake of Ireland." 

"But Ireland's not in this war!" 

"Sure it is! Mattie says the Germans are 
going to free Ireland if they beat England. 
That's why the Irish ought to be with the 
Germans. Mattie says your father'U be awful 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 9 

ashamed that you wouldn't go on his side. 
Mat tie says your father " 

"I don't give a whoop what Mattie says 
about my father," I told him. "I guess I can 
take my own part." 

"I guess you'll have to," said Joe. 

As I went up the street toward our house 
I had that queer feeling that comes sometimes 
after I've been away for a while, a fear that 
something terrible has happened while I've 
been gone and that I'll be blamed for it. It 
was dark on the street, for people hadn't lighted 
the lamps in the basement dining-rooms, and 
I was hurrying along when suddenly a man's 
voice came over my shoulder. I hadn't heard 
his step behind me at all, and I jumped when 
he spoke. "Where does Mr. John Sutton live ^ " 
he asked me. 

"Right there." I pointed to our house. 

"Do you know him.^" he asked. Through 
the dark I could see that he was a tall man with 
sharp eyes. I knew that I had never seen him 
before, and that he didn't look like any of the 



10 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

men who came to my father's machine-shop. 
"Don't you know Mr. Sutton .f^" he repeated. 

"Yes, sir." 

"Know him well, sonny.'*" 

"Yes, sir." 

"How well?" 

"He's my father." 

He whistled softly, then laughed, turned 
on his heel, and strode down the street. I 
watched him to see if he'd take the turn toward 
the shop, but he turned the other way at the 
corner. I thought that I'd tell my grandmother 
about him but my mother was with her in the 
dark when I went in. They were talking very 
low, as if some one were dead in the house, 
but I heard my mother say, "If I only knew 
how far he's gone in this !" and my grandmother 
mutter: "Sure, the farther he goes in, the 
farther back he'll have to come." I stumbled 
over a chair as I went into the room with them, 
and they both stopped talking. 

I could hear the little hissing whisper my 
grandmother always makes while she says the 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 11 

rosary, but I could hear no sound from my 
mother at all until she rose with a sigh and 
lighted the gas-lamp. She looked at me as if 
she hadn't known I'd been there. "Have you 
any home work to do to-night, John.^" she 
asked me. 

"No, ma'am," I said. "It's Friday." 

"Then I want you to come to church with 
me after your dinner," she said. 

"Oh, I don't want to go to church," I'd 
said before my grandmother spoke. 

"'Twill be a queer thing to me as long as 
I live," she said, "that those who have don't 
want what they have, and that those who 
haven't keep wanting." 

The telephone-bell rang just then up in the 
room that my father used for an office, and I 
raced up to answer it. A man's voice, younger 
than that of the man who'd spoken to me, came 
over the wire. *'Say, is this John Sutton's 
residence?" it asked. "And is he home.'^ And, 
if he isn't, who are you.'*" 

"What do you want.^^" I called. 



12 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

"Information. This is The World. We hear 
that there's to be a meeting of the clans to-night, 
and we want to know where it's to be held." 

"I don't know," I said. 

"Can you find out.'^" 

*'No," I lied. "There's nobody home." 

"Won't your father be home for dinner?" 

Even then I could hear his key turning in 
the lock, could hear him passing on his way 
up to his bedroom, but a queer kind of caution 
was being born in me. "No, sir," I said. 

"Who was that?" my grandmother asked 
me when I went down. 

I told her of the call, told her, too, of the 
man who had stopped me on the street. Her 
rosary slipped through her fingers. "I feared 
it," she said. Then the whisper of her praying 
began again. 

At dinner my father was strangely silent. 
Usually he talks a great deal, all about politics, 
and the newspapers, and the trouble with the 
schools, and woman suffrage, and war. But 
he said nothing at all except to ask me if the 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 13 

skating were good. My mother was just as 
quiet as he, and I would have been afraid to 
open my mouth if my grandmother hadn't 
started in to tell about New York in the days 
she'd come here, more than sixty-five years 
ago. She talked and talked about how dif- 
ferent everything had been then, with no tall 
buildings and no big bridges and no subways 
and no elevateds. "Faith, you can be proud of 
your native town, John," she said to my father. 

"I wish I'd been born in Ireland," he said. 

She laughed. "And if I'd stayed in Ireland 
I'd have starved," she said, "and little chance 
you'd have had of being born anywhere." 

"It might have been just as well," he said 
bitterly. 

"Oh, no," she said; "there's Shauneen." 

He rose from the table, flinging down his 
napkin. "I won't be home till very late," he 
said to my mother. 

She stood up beside him. "Do you have 
to go, John.f^" she asked him. 

"Yes," he said. 



14 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

"Oh, John," she said, "I'm afraid." 

"Of what?" 

"Of what may happen you." 

"Nothing'll happen me," he said. 

I wanted to tell him of the strange man 
who had halted me on the street, and of the 
telephone call, but my father's anger was rising 
and I feared to fan it to flame. My grand- 
mother said nothing until after my father had 
gone. Then she spoke to my mother. 

"Don't you know better," she asked her, 
"and you eighteen years married to him, than 
to ask John not to do something you don't 
want him to do.^^" 

My mother began to cry as we heard the 
banging of the door after my father. "Well, 
if you can do nothing else," my grandmother 
said, "you'd better be off to church. Keep 
your eyes open, Shauneen," she warned me 
while my mother was getting her hat and coat. 

It was a grand night, with the evening star 
low in the sky, like a lamp, and the big yellow 



I "MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 15 

i 

moon just rising in the east. The wind blew 
sharp and salt off the water, but there was a 
promise of spring in the air, saying that it must 
be almost baseball time. We went over to the 
Jesuit church, walking slowly all the way. 
There we knelt in the dark until I was stiff. 
As we came out my mother stopped at the holy- 
water font. "John," she said, "will you promise 
me that if you ever marry you'll never set any 
cause but God's above your wife.''" 

"No, ma'am, I won't," I said, vaguely un- 
derstanding that my father had hurt my mother 
by his refusal to stay at home, and wondering 
what cause he had set above her. As we walked 
toward the car-line I remembered what Joe 
Carey had told me of Mattie Kleiner's speech 
about my father. "Do you have to go to Ireland 
to die for Ireland .f'" I asked her. She clutched 
my hand. "My grandfather died for Ireland," 
she said, "and he wasn't the first of his line to 
die for her. But I pray God that he may have 
been the last." She said no more till we came 
into our own house. 



16 MY COL^TRY'S PART 

My grandmother was still at the window 
of the dining-room. There was no light, and 
my mother did not make one. "There was 
another telephone call," my grandmother said. 
"Norah answered it. 'Twas the newspaper 
calling again for John to ask about the meeting. 
She said she knew nothing about it and that 
no one was here to answer." 

"Do you suppose," I said, "it, was detec- 
tives?" 

They said nothing, and I could feel a big 
lump coming up my throat. I thought they 
might not have heard me until my grandmother 
said: "Do you know, Kate, where the meeting 
is.'' 

"I don't know, and I don't want to know," 
my mother cried. She turned to me sharply. 
"Go to bed, John," she said. 

"I know where the meetings are," I blurted 
out, eager enough for any excuse to put off 
the hateful order. "They're at Mattie Kleiner's 
house, because he hides on the stairs when they 
come, and he heard them take the oath." 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 17 

*'Is that Matthew Kleiner's boy?" my 
grandmother asked, so quietly that I thought 
she had not realized the importance of my 
news. 

"Yes, ma'am." 

"Go to bed, Shauneen." She repeated my 
mother's order. 

I went up-stairs, leaving the two of them 
silent in the dark. I whistled while I undressed, 
but I shivered after I had turned out the light 
and jumped between the sheets. I was going 
to lie awake waiting for my father's return, 
but I must have dozed, for I thought that it 
was in the middle of the night that something 
woke me. I knew, as soon as I woke, that some 
one was in my room. I could feel him groping. 
I tried to speak, but my tongue stuck to the 
roof of my mouth. Then I heard a faint 
whisper. "Shauneen," it said. 

So far away it seemed that I thought it 
might be a ghost until my grandmother spoke 
again. "Your mother's in bed now," she said. 
"Put on your clothes as quick as you can." 



18 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

"What is it?" I whispered. 

"We're going to Matthew Kleiner's, you 
and I," she said. "I'd go alone if I could see." 

" What tune is it .?^" 

"Between ten and eleven." 

I pulled my clothes on as fast as I could. 
Then stealthily as thieves we crept out from 
my room and down the stairs. I held my grand- 
mother's hand and wondered at its steadiness. 
When we had come outside the basement door 
she halted me. "Look down the street for the 
tall man," she bade me. There was no one in 
sight, however, and we walked along sturdily, 
turning corners until we came to Kleiner's. 

It was a red-brick house in a row, not a 
basement house like ours, but with a cellar 
below and an attic above its two main floors. 
There was no light on the first floor, but 
I thought that I saw a stream behind the drawn 
curtains up-stairs. I found the bell and pushed 
on it hard. No one came for a long time. I 
rang again. I could see shadows back of the 
shades before Mattie Kleiner's mother came. 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 19 

*'What is it?" she demanded before she opened 
the door. 

"Tell her that your mother's sick and that 
you've come for your father," my grandmother 
ordered me. I repeated what she'd said. Mrs. 
Kleiner opened the door. "Oh," she cried, "it 
is Mrs. Sutton and little John. Oh, you did 
frighten me. Is the mother very sick.^ I shall 
call the father." 

"Let me go to him," my grandmother said. 
We were inside the hall then, and I put her 
hand on the railing of the stairway. She had 
started up before Mrs. Kleiner tried to stop 
her. "I've a message for him," said my grand- 
mother. Mrs. Kleiner and I followed her. At 
the top of the stairs I turned her toward the 
front room, for I could hear the murmur of 
voices. I passed a door and wondered if Mattie 
Kleiner were hiding behind it. "Oh, we must 
not go in," Mrs. Kleiner pleaded. "The men 
will not want us to go in." She tried to stop 
us, but my grandmother turned, looking at 
her as if she could see her. "I've always fol- 



20 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

lowed my own conscience, ma'am," she said, 
"not my husband's, nor my son's, nor any other 



5 ?» 

man s. 



From within the front room came the sound 
of the voices, growing louder and louder as we 
stood there, my grandmother alert, Mrs. Kleiner 
appalled, I myseK athrill. I could hear my 
father's voice, short, sharp. "It's our great 
opportunity," he was saying. "We have only 
to strike the blow at England's empire, and 
the empire itself will arise to aid us. Twenty 
thousand men flung into Canada will turn the 
trick. French Quebec is disaffected. What if 
soldiers are there "? We can fight them ! We 
may die, but what if we do? We will have 
started the avalanche that will destroy Car- 
thage !" 

There were cries of "Right !" to him. Then 
a man began to talk in German. His voice 
rang out harshly. From the murmurs that 
came out to us we knew that the men were ap- 
plauding his words, but we had no idea of what 
the words were. Mrs. Kleiner stood wringing 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 21 

her hands. "Who's in there ? " my grandmother 
asked her. 

"I do not know," she insisted. 

"Joe Krebs's uncle is there," I said. "1 
know his cough. And Mr. Winngart who keeps 
the deHcatessen-shop. And Frank Belden's 
father; and that's Mr. Carey's voice." 

"They just meet for fun," groaned Mrs. 
Kleiner. 

"Sure, I saw that kind of fun before," said 
my grandmother, "when the Fenians went 
after the Queen's Own." 

My father's voice rose again. "We are 
ready to fire the torch .^^ We are ready to send 
out the word to-night for the mobilization of 
our sympathizers? We are ready to stand to- 
gether to the bitter end.^" 

"We are ready !" came the shout. 

Then my grandmother opened the door. 

Through the haze of their tobacco smoke 
they looked up, the dozen men crowded into 
the Kleiners' front bedroom, to see my grand- 
mother standing before them, a bent old woman 



22 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

in her black dress and shawl, her little jet bonnet 
nodding valiantly from its perch on her thin 
white hair. She looked around as if she could 
see every one of them. My father had sprung 
forward at her coming, and, as if to hold him 
off, she put up one hand. 

"7^ it yourself, John Sutton, who's talking 
here of plots, and plans, and war f she said. 
Her voice went up to a sharp edge. She flung 
back her head as if she defied them to answer 
her. All of them, my father and Joe Krebs's 
uncle and Mattie Kleiner's father and Mr. 
Carey and Mr. Winngart and the big man who'd 
had the blue-prints in the shop, and the others, 
stared at her as if she were a ghost. No 
one of them moved as she spoke. '"Tis a fine 
lot you are to be sitting here thinking ways to 
bring trouble on yourselves, and your wives, 
and your children, and your country. Who 
are there here of you.^^ Is it yourself, Benedict 
Krebs, who's going out to fight for Germany 
when your own father came to this very street 
to get away from Prussia ? Is it you, Matthew 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 23 

Kleiner, who gives roof to them who plot against 
America, you, who came here to earn a living 
that you couldn't earn at home? Is it you, 
Michael Carey, who's helping them hurt the 
land that's making you a rich man ? Shame on 
you; shame on you all!" 

"Why shouldn't we fight England?" Joe 
Carey's father said with a growl. "You'd be 
the last one, Mrs. Sutton, that I'd think'd set 
yourself against that." 

'"Tis not England," said my grandmother, 
"that you fight with your plots. 'Tis America 
you strike when you strike here. And, as long 
as you stay here, be Americans and not 
traitors !" 

They began to murmur at that, and my 
father said: "You don't know what you're 
talking about, mother. You'd better take John 
home. This is no place for either of you." 

"No more than it's a place for you," she 
said. "Will you be coming home with me 
now.'' 

"I will not," my father said. 



24 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

''Faith, and you'll all be wishing you had," 
she told them, "when the jails'll be holding 
you in the morning." 

"The jails!" The big man who had held 
the blue-prints came closer to us. "What is 
it you say of jails .'^ You have told the police, 
then.?" 

"I didn't need to," my grandmother said. 
"The government men have been watching 
this long time. 'Twill be at midnight that 
they'll come here. But 'tis not myself they'll 
be finding." I saw the men's glances flash 
around the room through the smoky haze be- 
fore she called: "Come, Shauneen." I took 
her hand again and led her out of the room. 
Just before the door closed after us I saw that 
my father's face had grown very white, and 
that Mattie Kleiner's father had dropped his 
pipe on the floor. 

Outside the house I spoke to my grand- 
mother tremblingly. "Do the police really 
know.f^" I asked her. She gave her dry little 
chuckle. "If they don't, they should," she 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 25 

answered; "but I was born an O'Brien, and 
I've never known one of them yet that ever 
told the poKce anything. No, Shauneen," she 
laughed, "'twas the high hill I shot at, but I'm 
thinking that the shot struck. We'll watch." 

We crossed the street and waited in the 
shadow of the house at the corner. For a little 
while all was quiet at Kleiner's. Then I saw 
the tall man come out with Joe Krebs's uncle. 
After a time my father came out with Mr. Winn- 
gart and Mr. Carey. They walked to the other 
corner and stood there a moment before they 
separated, "Shall we go home now.^^" I asked 
my grandmother after I had told her what I 
had seen. 

"Not yet," she said. "I've one more errand 
to do this night." I thought it might have 
something to do with the tall man who'd spoken 
to me or with the telephone call, and I won- 
dered when she sighed. "I'm a very old 
woman," she seemed to be saying to herself. 
"I'll be ninety-one years come Michaelmas 
Day. Some of the world I've seen, and much 



26 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

of" life. Out of it all I've brought but a few 
things. I'd thought to give these to my son. 
But — " She paused. "How old are you, 
Shauneen.'^" she asked me. 

"Fourteen," I said. 

"Old enough," she nodded. She turned 
her head as if she were looking for something 
or some one. Then: "Do you know your way 
to the Battery .f^" she asked me. 

"Sure," I told her. "Are you going there .f^" 

"We are." 

It had been quiet enough in our part of 
town. It was quieter yet when we came to 
Bowling Green and walked across to the Bat- 
tery. Down there, past the high buildings and 
the warehouses, we seemed to have come into 
the heart of a hush. To the north of us the 
sky was afire with the golden glow from the 
up-town lights. In front of us ran the East 
River and the North River. Out on Bedloe's 
Island I could see the shining of the Goddess 
of Liberty's torch. Every little while a ferry- 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 27 

boat, all yellow with lights, would shoot out 
on the water. A sailing-vessel moved slowly 
after its puffing tug. The little oyster-boats 
were coming in from the bay. A steamer glided 
along past it as I walked with my grandmother 
out toward the old Castle Garden. 

On the Saturday before Joe Carey and I 
had come down to the piers, prowling all after- 
noon on the docks, watching the men bringing 
in the queer crates and boxes and bags while 
we told each other of the places from where 
the fruits and spices and coffee and wines had 
come. There were thousands and thousands 
of ships out there in the dark, I knew, and I 
began to tell my grandmother what some of 
the sailors had told us of how the trade of the 
world was crowding into New York, with the 
ships all pressing the docks for room. "If you 
could only see it!" I said to her. "I can see 
more than that," she said. Then: "Take me 
to the edge of the waters," she bade me. 

Wondering and a little frightened, I obeyed 
her, trying to solve the while the mystery of 



28 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

her whim to bring me to the deserted park in 
the middle of the night. "Is Castle Garden 
over there?" she pointed. "Then I've my 
bearings now." 

She stood alone, a little way off from me, 
staring seaward as if she counted the shadowy 
ships. The wind blew her thin white hair from 
under her bonnet and raised the folds of her 
shawl. There in the lateness of the night, alone 
at the edge of the Battery, she didn't seem to 
be my grandmother at all, but some stranger. 
I remembered the story I'd read somewhere of 
an old woman who'd brought a pile of books 
to a King of Rome, books that she threw away, 
one by one, as he refused them, until there was 
but one book left. When he'd bought that one 
from her he'd found that it was the book of 
the future of the empire, and that he'd lost all 
the rest through his folly. As I looked at my 
grandmother I thought she must be like the old 
woman of the story. Even her voice sounded 
strange and deep when she turned to me. 

"It was sixty -five years ago the 7th of 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 29 

November that I first stood on this soil," she 
said. '"Tis a long lifetime, and, thank God, 
a useful one I've had. Burdens I've had, but 
never did I lack the strength to bear them. 
Looking back, I'm sorry for many a word and 
many a deed, but I've never sorrowed that I 
came here." 

I would have thought that she had forgotten 
me if she hadn't touched my arm. "You've 
heard tell of the famine, Shauneen," she went 
on, "the great famine that fell on Ireland, 
blighting even the potatoes in the ground .f^ 
We'd a little place in Connaught then, a bit 
of land my father was tilling. We hadn't much, 
even for the place, but we were happy enough, 
God knows, with our singing and dancing, and 
the fairs and the patterns. Then little by little, 
we grew poorer and poorer. I was the oldest of 
the seven of us. My mother and myself'd be 
planning and scraping to find food for the rest of 
them. Every day we'd see them growing thinner 
and thinner. Oh, mavrone, the pity of it ! And 
thcv looking at us betimes as if we were cheat- 



30 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

Ing them of their bit of a sup ! Sometimes now 
in the dark I see them come to my bed, with 
their soft eyes begging for bread, and we having 
naught to give them. Brigid — she was the 
youngest of them all — died. Then my father 
went. 

"I used to go down to the sea and hunt the 
wrack for bits of food. There by the shore I 
would look over here to America and pray, 
day after day, that the Lord would send to us 
some help before my mother should go. You 
don't know what it is to pray, Shauneen. Your 
father cannot teach you and your mother hopes 
you'll never learn. For prayer is born in agony, 
avick, and grief and loss and sorrow. But be- 
cause you are the son of my soul I pray for you 
that life may teach you prayer. For when you 
come to the end of the road, Shauneen, you'll 
know that 'tis not the smoothness of the way, 
but the height of it and the depth of it, that 
measures your travelling. Far, far down in 
the depths I went when I prayed over there 
on the bleak coast of Connaught. 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 31 

"God answered my prayer. There came 
from America food to us. There came, too, 
the chance for me to come here with the promise 
of work to do. 'Twas a drear day when I left 
home. How I cursed England as I looked back 
on the hills of Cork harbor, all green and smiling 
as if never a blight had cast its shadow behind 
them ! 

"'Twas a long, dreary sailing. Nine weeks 
we were in the crossing. A lifetime I thought 
it was between the day I looked on the western 
sea from the Connaught mountains and the 
day when I stood here looking back toward 
home. Sure life is full of lifetimes like those." 

She paused a moment, but I felt as if I were 
under a spell that I must not break by word 
of mine. A cloud came over the moon and all 
around us grew shadowy. The big throb that 
the city always beats at night kept sounding 
like the thrumming of an orchestra waiting for 
the violin solo to start. 

"I'd plenty of them before many years." 
My grandmother's voice came like the sound 



32 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

for which the thrumming had waited. "Did 
you ever think what it means to the poor souls 
who come here alone for their living? When 
you've a house of your own, Shauneen, with 
men servants and maid servants, don't forget 
that your father's mother worked out for some 
one. They were kind people, too, who took 
me to their homes. Don't forget that either. 
For 'tis my first memory of America. Kind 
they were, and just. They helped me save 
what I earned and they showed me ways of 
helping my folks at home. I'd brought out 
Danny and James and Ellen and Mary before 
the war. I met each one of them right here at 
Castle Garden. That's why I always think 
of this place as the gateway through which 
the Irish have come to America. Sure Ellis 
Island's been for the Italians and the Jews and 
the Greeks. We didn't wait outside the door. 
We came straight in," she chuckled. 

"My mother wouldn't come from the old 
place. Long I grieved over her there in the 
little house where my father and Brigid had 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 33 

died, but after a while I knew she was happier 
so. Sometimes, Shauneen, I think of Ireland 
as an old woman, like my mother, sitting home 
alone in the old places, grieving, mourning, 
with her children out over the world, living the 
dreams of her nights by the fire. 'Twas here 
we found the freedom the Irish had been fight- 
ing for. 'Twas here, away from landlords and 
landholding, away from famine and persecution, 
that we found that life need not be a thing of 
sorrow. 'Twas here I met your grandfather. 

"I'd nothing of my own, and your grand- 
father had but a trifle more when we married. 
I suppose 'tis brave that people would call us 
now. We didn't think that we were. We were 
young and strong and we loved each other. 
And we were getting along fairly well — we'd 
started the payments on a bit of a house of 
our own after your father was born — when 
the war came down on us. 

"Your grandfather went with the brigade. 
Not twice did we think whether or not he should 
go. We knew that he owed his first duty to 



34 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

the country that had called him, and sheltered 
him, and given him work and hope and freedom. 
For he was a boy from home as I was a girl 
from home. I stood on the curbstone the day 
he marched by, with your father in my arms, 
and I cheered for the flag. 'Sure he'll be walk- 
ing to meet you when you come back ! ' I 
called, lifting up the child. Your grandfather 
never came back. He fell at Marye's Heights." 
When she spoke again her voice had changed 
more to her every-day tone. "Well, I raised 
your father," she said, "and I thought I was 
raising him well. My arms were strong. I 
worked at the wash-tub morning, noon, and 
night. It wasn't long till I had a laundry of 
my own. I thought to give my son all that I'd 
ever wanted for myself. Perhaps that was 
where I made my mistake. I thought too much 
of the things that money can buy in those years 
when money was so hard to earn. Perhaps 
'twas myself and no other who taught your 
father the cold, hard things of life, though, 
God knows, I'd no thought to do it. He's a 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 35 

good man in many ways, but he's not the man 
I want you to be. He's a good hater but he's 
not a good lover. And, faith, what's there in 
Hfe but love.'^" 

I moved a httle then, and my grandmother 
swung me around, with her two hands on my 
shoulders, and, blind as she is, stared at me as 
if she were looking right down into my heart. 
*'Shauneen," she said, "I have prayed, day 
and night, that your father might be to America 
the good citizen his father was. I have prayed 
that if America should ever need him he would 
stand ready for her call. I have prayed that 
he'd love America as I have loved America. 
I love Ireland, mavrone. Always in my heart 
do I see her hills as they looked on the morning 
I looked back on them from the sea. But I 
love America, too, and I wanted my son to 
love her even more than I do. I've wanted 
him to love this land as my fathers and their 
fathers loved Ireland. 'Twas not that I wanted 
him to forget my land; when he was a lad like 
you I'd tell him tales of Ireland's glory and of 



36 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

Ireland's woe. How was I to know that all it 
would do for him was to rouse the black hate 
for England? I taught him love for Ireland, 
but never did I teach him to set my land above 
his own. 

"For 'twas America gave us our chance, 
Shauneen, when we'd no other place on earth 
to seek. Hard days we've known here, too, 
days when even the children jeered at us, but 
we've never felt the hand of the oppressor upon 
us since we touched our feet on these shores. 
We've been free and we've prospered. Fine 
houses we have and fine clothes; and 'tis a long 
day since I knew the pinch of hunger. This is 
our debt. Tell me again, Shauneen, what you 
see out there .'^" 

I told her of the shining lights, of the funnels 
of the steamers, of the piled piers, of the little 
oyster-boats, of the great liners waiting the 
word for their sailing. 

*"Twould be a fine sight," she sighed. *'Do 
you think me a madwoman to bring you here ? " 
she went on, as if she had read my thought. 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 37 

"Perhaps I am that. Perhaps I'm not. For 
you'll remember this night when you've for- 
gotten many another time, just as I remember 
the day when my mother took me to the shrine 
at Knock. For this is the shrine of your coun- 
try, Shauneen, this old Castle Garden, where 
your people set foot in the land that's given 
them liberty. Here it was that I told my 
brothers and my sisters of the future before 
them. Here it is that I'm telling you that your 
country will be the greatest nation of all the 
world if only you lads stay true to her. That's 
why I've brought you here to-night, Shauneen. 
I'm an old, old woman. I've not long for this 
earth. But I've this message for you; it's 
yours; this duty that your father shirks when 
he plots with black traitors who'd drag us into 
wars that are not of our choosing. Raise your 
hand, Shauneen. Say after me: 'As long as I 
live, God helping me, I shall keep my country first 
in my heart and, after God, first in my soul .'"' 

Through the misty moonlight there came 
to me the memory of my mother's plea at the 



38 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

door of the church, my mother's cry: "Promise 
me that you'll set no cause but God's before 
your wife!" Some battle of spirit struggled 
within me. For an instant I was silent. Then, 
suddenly, as if the moon had ridden above the 
cloud, I saw the right. "Since all true causes 
come from God," I said to myself, "it is right 
to set my own country above anything else 
that may ever come." And I said the words 
after my grandmother. 

She took my face between her hands and 
kissed me. " God keep you, Shauneen," she said, 
"for the woman who'll love you, and the chil- 
dren you'll teach, and the land you'll serve!" 

Then through a sleeping city my grand- 
mother and I went home. 

Our country's part is to keep the flame of 
freedom burning above the darkness of the 
world. Our part is to feed that flame with the 
oil of our love of our country. No matter what 
our duty may be, whether it be great or small, 
let us do it as our country asks; that we may 



"MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF" 39 

keep our land the place where men may live 
in freedom, in justice, in peace. 

We have come upon troubled times. We 
have enemies at home as well as abroad. We 
have those who would cry "Peace at any price," 
when our country knows that the only endur- 
ing peace is one which is won with honor. We 
have those who would barter American ideals 
for immediate comfort, those who would sell 
the future for the present. It is our part, the 
part of each and every American, to stand firm 
for those principles which America has cherished 
and for which she fights to-day. It is our part 
to be American, to think American, to pray 
American. It is our duty to remember what 
America does for us. It is our privilege to do 
what we can for America. Every man, woman, 
and child in the United States, not in active war 
service in army or navy, is nothing less than a 
licensed pilot, steering the ship of his patriotism 
among rough waters. It is his part to steer it 
straight, and, as the President said of the na- 
tion, "God helping him, he can do no other." 



CHAPTER II 

THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR 

In the last days of April, 1918, fifty men 
in the khaki of the army of the United States 
of America landed at an Atlantic port. Their 
coming, unheralded and almost unwelcomed, 
marked one of the most important events in 
the history of our country. For they were the 
first homecoming veterans of the American 
Expeditionary Forces, men who had fought 
under Pershing on the soil of France for the 
principles that inspired our nation's entrance 
into the world war. 

There was the man who had fired the first 
American gun in the battles. There was the 
man who had stood beside the first man killed 
in action. There was the man who had brought 
five German prisoners back into camp after 
the rush on the trenches. Wounded, disabled, 
made unfit for further immediate service, they 

40 



UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR 41 

had been sent home; and they came back to 
their country, the advance-guard of the greatest 
army the United States has ever assembled 
and one of the greatest armies the world has 
ever seen, to bear witness to the fact that 
America has actually taken her place in the 
world struggle. 

They had fought under German fire. They 
had stood beside French soldiers and British 
soldiers in the attack. They had received their 
baptism of blood. They had set the flag of 
the United States of America on the battle- 
fronts in the standard that bears the flags of 
those nations which are defend'ing the rights 
of democracy against the invasion of autocracy. 
They are of the first division of an American 
army to fight a battle for America in the fields 
of Europe; and they had come home to give 
testimony of what America's part in the great 
war really is. For they are the first of the mil- 
lions of fighters whom the nation has gathered 
for the winning of the war. 

Even when the United States entered the 



42 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

great war on the 6th of April, 1917, the part 
that we would take in the conflict was not clearly 
defined. Would we send an army abroad? 
Would our navy fight? Or would we merely 
defend our own shores against possible attack, 
and supply the other nations at war with Ger- 
many with food, munitions, and other supplies ? 
The question was soon answered by American 
honesty which thundered that the only way 
to wage war was to send soldiers to the scene of 
battle. Preparations never equalled in the his- 
tory of the world went into effect for the pur- 
pose of conveying our soldiers over the ocean, 
of supplying them and equipping them, and of 
standing back of the troops and peoples of the 
Allies who were already at war with Germany. 
Not, however, until more than a year after 
the beginning of our part in the war was the 
issue of exactly what the United States would 
do on the battle-fronts settled. Then the Presi- 
dent of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, 
gave the order that General John Pershing, in 
command of the American Expeditionary Forces, 



UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR 43 

should place the American force at the disposi- 
tion of General Foch of France, commander- 
in-chief for the armies of the Allies. The Amer- 
ican Expeditionary Forces slipped into place, 
and American soldiers began the actual fight- 
ing of America's war. 

For the war into which our nation has en- 
tered is, in spite of the fact that it is being fought 
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, as much 
America's war and a war of defense as if it 
were being fought along our own Atlantic sea- 
board against an invading army. It is being 
fought for the same principles which are the 
only ones great enough to force our country 
to war, principles of freedom for the individual, 
freedom for the free-governed nations, and of 
ultimate, lasting peace for the world. It is 
being fought against the forces of aggression, 
of greed, of injustice. It is being fought against 
the intention of Germany to dominate the 
world. 

In every war there are two great issues 
battling against each other. Men fight for one 



44 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

or the other. Nations fight for one or the other. 
There have been wars of conquest waged by 
strong nations against weaker ones, wars of 
rehgion, wars of territorial aggression, wars of 
defense, wars of trade, wars of high moral ideals. 
This is a war where the issue is sharply set. It 
is a war where democracy fights against au- 
tocracy, where liberty fights against bondage, 
where freemen fight to keep their freedom 
against men who strive to take it away from 
them. 

There are two kinds of nations in the world, 
those nations which believe that governments 
derive their just powers from the consent of 
the governed and those other nations which 
believe that power comes from God to Kings 
to be used over people who have nothing to 
say about its use. The first is a democracy, 
even though it have a monarch nominally as its 
head. The other is an autocracy. And, since 
this is a war of democracy against autocracy, it 
is really a war of the free people of the world 
against the bondsmen and their masters. 



UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR 45 

There was a time when all the great nations 
of the world had Kings. It was part of the 
evolution of the social system. Nations need 
leaders, and there were men so strong that they 
were able to seize and hold leadership, keeping 
it for their sons so that the people came to ac- 
cept one family as its rulers. But in time some 
nations began to emerge from the yoke that 
these rulers set upon them. The people, who 
had been serfs and slaves, began to demand 
a voice in the government. Kings and nobles 
began to lose power in these nations with the 
awakening of the people. The signing of the 
Magna Charta in England by King John 
marked the transfer of power from the King. 
Bit by bit in those nations tending toward 
liberal government the shift of power took 
place. 

It was not until the last quarter of the 
eighteenth century, however, that the theory 
of free government flowered and bore fruit. 
Then the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, 
situated along the western Atlantic seaboard, 



46 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

revolted against the imposition of a tax that 
the colonists considered unjust, went to war, 
and won the war. They established the United 
States of America, a nation which has been 
from that day to this a genuine democracy, a 
free republic based absolutely on the doctrine 
that power came from the people, and that 
government exists merely as the steward of that 
power. 

It was through the aid given to the Colonies 
by France, brought by Lafayette and Rocham- 
beau, that the War of the Revolution was won. 
The French soldiers, returning home at its close, 
took with them reinforcement of the spirit of 
desire for freedom that was already animating 
France and which in time brought about the 
beginnings of the French Revolution, a war 
which changed France from a monarchy where 
the King said with truth "I am the state" to 
a real democracy. 

The example of the United States of America 
inspired other nations of Europe toward the 
ideal of a government in which the people should 



UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR 47 

have a voice. Our republican institutions have 
had a reflex upon English institutions so that 
to-day Great Britain, in spite of having a 
nominal King, is one of the most democratic 
governments in the world. The King of Italy 
holds his power as a result of a war in which the 
people of Italy wrested freedom from Austrian 
domination. And Russia, at the time when it 
went into war, was moving toward a more 
elastic form of government. That it failed in 
the experiment was due to German intrigue, and 
not to lack of desire of the Russian people for 
self-government. 

On the other hand, the people of the Central 
Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, have 
accepted — sometimes with mutterings of revolt, 
but eventually with resignation — the idea that 
their rulers derived authority from some divine 
source. Few nations in modern times have 
had less voice in the government of their coun- 
try than the people of Germany. For, under 
the German constitution, Germany is governed 
by its Emperor, with its legislative power in 



48 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

two bodies, the Bundesrat and the Reichstag. 
Now, the United States puts its legislative power 
into two bodies, the Senate and the House of 
Representatives. France puts power into the 
Chamber of Deputies, England into the House 
of Commons and the House of Lords. But 
England is shearing the power of the House of 
Lords, and in our country the Senate and the 
House of Representatives are elected by and 
are directly responsible to the voters of the 
country. Here, as in France and in England, 
the vote is not restricted by wealth or by class. 
In Germany the vote is so arranged that 370 
rich men have the same voting power as 22,324 
poor men in one district, Cologne; while the 
Bundesrat is merely a diplomatic assembly, 
representing the kingdoms of the German Em- 
pire, an assembly which the King of Prussia 
absolutely dominates, and through which he 
becomes, as Emperor of Germany, absolute 
ruler of the empire. For the Reichstag has no 
power to make or unmake ministries, or to 
control the Emperor in any way. The Emperor 



UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR 49 

appoints the chancellor, and the chancellor is 
answerable only to him. So that in the long 
run, although it has a constitutional form, the 
government of Germany is the Emperor of 
Germany and the military group known as 
Junkers with whom he has surrounded him- 
self. 

The Emperor of Germany and the Junkers 
of his Prussia forced the present war. They 
prepared for it during years while the rest of 
the world was keeping peace. They justified 
it to their people on the ground that Germany 
needed new territory, new trade, new markets. 
Although she was gaining the trade and markets 
without war, Germany's leader made this their 
excuse to their people, and when they were 
ready they went to war for the purpose of im- 
posing their form of government upon peoples 
who did not want it, of forcing their rule upon 
nations opposed to their ideas. Serbia lay in 
their path of conquest into Asia, and so they 
caused Austria, their tool, to make an excuse of 
the assassination by a Serbian of an Austrian 



50 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

archduke, and declare war on the small nation. 
Then Germany invaded Belgimn, with which it 
was not at war, to get to France, against which 
war had been declared. Belgium resisted. 
England entered the conflict. The struggle 
was on. 

Month after month the aggressions of Ger- 
many caused new nations to break off relations 
with her. Italy and Japan entered the war. 
China, most peaceful of nations in her rela- 
tions with the outside world, broke off rela- 
tions. One after another of the South American 
republics were forced to do the same. The 
United States, after a long period of patient 
endurance of German insults, attacks on our 
commerce, intrigues and plots in our own coun- 
try, restriction of our maritime activities in 
defiance of international law, was finally driven 
to announcement of the existence of a state of 
war. The lines were drawn. Democracy was 
making a stand for its life against autocracy, 
the freemen of the world against the bonds- 
men. 



UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR 51 

It is right and fitting that the United States 
of America should take her place in a war which 
is being fought for those principles for which 
she has stood since her coming into nation- 
hood. For more than a century and a quarter 
she has been, like the Statue of Liberty in the 
harbor of New York, a symbolic figure to the 
world beaconing men to freedom. It is in line 
with her history that she should go to Europe 
for the same cause for which she has fought 
all her wars — defense of the weaker against the 
stronger, the right of people to determine their 
own governments, the right of all to be free. 

There is a story told of General Pershing's 
entrance into Paris. He was taken to the tomb 
of Lafayette. His hosts crowded about him, 
waiting for his speech. But, like all American 
soldiers, Pershing is no orator. *'Well, Lafay- 
ette," he said, "we're here!" That was all. 
But France, hearing, understood. America 
was there, to fight side by side with them, to 
suffer with them, to die with them, that the 
cause of liberty for which Lafayette had fought 



52 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

on two continents might live. The world war 
had menaced the United States in its sacred 
institution of freedom, and the United States 
had met the challenge, and had come to fight 
for that which is dearer than life — honor, and 
right, and justice. 



CHAPTER III 

WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS 

The history of the human race has been 
the history of man's struggle toward freedom. 
Because certain nations have seen the Kght 
sooner than others, they have been the object 
of attack by these others, primarily because 
the rulers of the latter have been shrewd enough 
to see that revolution is contagious. A free 
neighbor threatens the existence of a monarch 
who derives his power from the force with which 
he has surrounded himself and from the blind- 
ness of his own people. A free neighbor is there- 
fore a menace to autocracy, and something to 
be crushed. 

When the people of France, inspired by the 
example of the United States, arose in revolu- 
tion against their monarch, the revolution shook 
the thrones of Europe. The King of France 
was closer in blood to other royal families of 

53 



54 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

Europe than he was to the people whom he 
had governed. The Queen of France was a 
Hapsburg, of the royal family of Austria, whose 
representatives were in almost every royal 
house of the Continent of Europe. The success 
of the French Revolution was the handwriting 
on the wall; and every Belshazzar on a throne 
had a Daniel of statesmanship to tell him what 
it meant. 

Almost at once the Kings of Europe rallied 
against France, because free France threatened 
the existence of the Kings. France fought val- 
iantly. The military establishment which she 
had to assume to protect her rights, however, 
swung her out of the republican form of govern- 
ment she had set up, and Napoleon Bonaparte, 
who won her wars, became her Emperor. The 
change, however, did not swing back the French 
people into any slavish acceptance of royalty. 
They held, in spite of Bonaparte's court, their 
fundamental democracy; and it was a demo- 
cratic army which France sent across Europe. 
Napoleon himself said that every private car- 



WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS 55 

ried a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack. 
Every man had a chance for promotion. Every 
man had a chance to better his life. And, be- 
cause France remained fundamentally demo- 
cratic, the Kings battled against Bonaparte. 
They defeated him, finally; but they did 
not defeat France, for its spirit remained 
free. 

Germany, nearest neighbor to France, had 
never known democracy. Once part of the 
vast kingdom known as the Holy Roman Em- 
pire, she had disintegrated into little states, 
kingdoms, duchies, and archbishoprics, each 
ruled by one-man power. Sometimes a King, 
stronger than the others, drew the kingdoms 
together for purposes of warfare against other 
countries. Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 
fought against Austria. With him the power of 
Prussia rose. After his death it declined so that 
Napoleon found the conquest of Prussia easy, 
and went about it so thoroughly that he made 
the French conquest a profound humiliation to 
the Prussians. Even his defeat at Waterloo 



56 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

failed to pay the debt Prussia cherished against 
the French. 

It was in the time of Napoleon that the 
German people came nearer to freedom of spirit 
than they had been before or have been since. 
For in fighting a foreign enemy who sought 
power even as the Hohenzollern ruler of Ger- 
many seeks it to-day, the youth of Germany 
glimpsed the truth of democracy. With Napo- 
leon's defeat they stood ready to move forward 
toward it. But again the Kings intervened. 

There was formed in Europe at that time 
the Holy Alliance, that same group of Kings 
and Kingmakers who sought to restore to Spain 
its revolting colonies in South America, and 
who held firmly to the idea of the divine right 
of Kings. This Holy Alliance throttled free 
thought in Germany. By 1848 revolutions for 
the right of freedom surged up throughout the 
German states and kingdoms and principalities. 
They were beaten down by the ruling powers, 
one helping the other. It was at this time that 
the German emigration toward the United 



WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS 57 

States began, for the leaders of the revolution 
sought a land where they could be free. Those 
who stayed came in time to accept the system 
which the rulers imposed upon them. 

The putting down of the revolution of 1848 
gave Prussia increased power. She had a dis- 
ciplined standing army, and a military estab- 
lishment. In 1862 William I became King. 
He made Bismarck his prime minister, and the 
march of Prussia toward world conquest began. 

Bismarck made the whole Prussian nation 
into an army. Then he made alliance with 
Austria to secure the duchy of Schleswig-Hol- 
stein from Denmark. Then he provoked a 
quarrel with Austria so that Prussia might 
deprive her of all influence over the other Ger- 
man states. He won his object in a six-weeks' 
war in 1866. But he was not satisfied with the 
power he had won, for democratic France — 
democratic for all her acceptance of another 
Napoleon for her throne — still threatened the 
power of Kings who claimed that their power 
came from God, and not from their people. 



58 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

Prussia waited its chance. When France 
was unprepared, a quarrel was brought on, 
and the blow struck. Prussia took Alsace and 
Lorraine from her. Then the King of Prussia 
was made Emperor of Germany. 

The territory which Prussia had acquired 
for the German Empire, for Alsace and Lor- 
raine are the richest mineral districts of France, 
gave Germany opportunity for that industrial 
development which has marked her history 
since the Franco-Prussian War. Germany's 
population overcrowded her territorial space. 
Germany grew rich and prosperous. Germany 
became highly efficient in mechanical arts. 
German trade reached out over the world, but 
found the barriers of the establishment of other 
nations. The German army remained a great 
machine, officered by Prussian nobles. Ger- 
many grew so mighty that she grew to believe 
that might makes right. She had the might, 
and she made ready to exercise it. 

First of all, she needed trade routes. She 
needed a way to the sea more open than the 



WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS 59 

Hamburg harbors. She wanted a road to Asia. 
She wanted to control the gateway to the rich 
Orient. She wanted an empire that would 
contain Austria-Hungary as well as Germany 
proper. And she set out to win it all. 

In 1914 the situation was this: Francis 
Joseph, Emperor of Austria, was an old man, 
a sick man. His empire, composed of scores 
of nationalities, held together by a thin thread. 
If he died, it might disintegrate into groups of 
free peoples. Serbia, its near neighbor, had 
won independence. The Balkan wars had 
shifted power to small states that stood be- 
tween Germany and the Orient. Russia was 
disaffected. A revolution might come at any 
time that would dethrone the Czar. Unless a 
war, and a great war, was started, many and 
great free nations would soon surround Ger- 
many, cutting her off from the way to the Orient. 
France, her hated neighbor, flaunted her free 
institutions in her face and remembered Alsace 
and Lorraine. England cut her off from un- 
restricted rule of the sea. To be sure, she was 



60 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

not eager to force war with England, since the 
German navy had not arrived at the point of 
preparedness of the German army. England 
could wait until Germany had conquered the 
rest of Europe. Then, when England was con- 
quered, too, Germany would punish the United 
States for our "international impertinence" as 
Bismarck called our policy of the Monroe Doc- 
trine. It was the time to strike. Germany, as 
usual in the Bismarckian policy, made the oc- 
casion. 

Down in Bosnia, a Balkan state which Aus- 
tria had seized and held against the will of its 
people, an anarchist threw a bomb which killed 
an Austrian archduke in June, 1914. For a 
time no action came of the happening. Then 
Austria announced that she had discovered that 
the assassination was the result of a Serbian 
plot, known to the Serbian Government, Bos- 
nia's neighbor and the friend of her freedom. 
Therefore she declared war on Serbia. Ger- 
many gave her consent to the ultimatum. She 
was taking her opportunity. 



WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS 61 

Knowing that a war of Austria against 
Serbia would open a way for her own progress 
toward the East, Germany, being prepared to 
the last gun and last man, forced the issue. 
She knew that Russia would rise against her, 
but she knew, better than the Russian Govern- 
ment did, how unprepared Russia was. On the 
first day of August, 1914, she declared war 
against Russia. On the fourth day of August 
the Reichstag, the people's legislative body of 
Germany, met and for the first time learned 
officially of what had been done. By that time 
the German Government had put itself in a 
position of war against Russia, France, Great 
Britain, and Belgium, a fact which proves how 
little the German people had to say about the 
making of actual warfare. 

In utter contempt of a treaty which had 
been signed Germany invaded Belgium on the 
way to France. Belgium resisted the invasion. 
A Chinese schoolboy, writing of the event in a 
school in western Canada months afterward, 
phrased the story better than any historian 



62 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

has done. "Germany," he wrote, "said to 
Belgium: 'Let me through.' Belgium said: 'I 
am not a road. I am a nation.'" And Bel- 
gium proved to the world how strong a small 
nation may be in courage. For she resisted 
Germany so well that France had time to gather 
her forces for defense. The drive to Paris was 
stopped. Prussia had announced that its armies 
would be in Paris in an almost incredibly short 
time. 

In the meantime Germany made alliance 
with the Sultan of Turkey. The war on the 
eastern front began. Hordes of Austrians and 
Germans swarmed over Poland into Russia, 
and back again as Russia beat them back, then 
forward again as Russia collapsed. In Egypt, 
in Palestine, in Mesopotamia war has raged. 
Japan joined. China broke off relations with 
Germany. Japan holds troops at the eastern 
end of the Russian-Siberian railway, waiting 
for the word of the Allies to strike westward. 

In the west the war has remained almost 
stationary since the initial sweep of the German 



WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS 63 

hordes; but eastward Germany has driven her 
armies toward her goal. Russia has disinte- 
grated, pulled apart by the insidious forces of 
German intrigue. Germany has the open way 
to the East. She has the resources of Austria- 
Hungary, of Russia, of Asia Minor at her com- 
mand. 

Had it not been for Germany's idea that 
she could conquer the world in one war, an 
idea supported by her eastward conquests, she 
might be nearer to ultimate success than she 
is to-day. For the entrance of the United States 
into the war, provoked by German measures 
of attack on American commerce, has materially 
changed the issue. It has put heart into the 
Allies, as well as opening up the field of supplies 
of men and munitions for them. Our country 
has barely begun to fight, for it has taken a 
year to bear to France the necessary troops 
and equipment. 

However long the war may be, it is one that 
must be fought to the end. For, as a river puri- 
fies itself as it flows, so has the issue of the war 



64 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

defined itself as it has progressed. In its be- 
ginning Germany strove to make the world 
believe that it was a trade war between Aus- 
tria and Serbia which Russia had entered for 
the injury of Austria and which had been forced 
on Germany in Austria's defense. Then she 
claimed that she fought England "for the free- 
dom of the seas." The war against Belgium 
was "a military necessity," the submarine war- 
fare against neutral nations "a retaliatory 
measure against blockade." But in the long 
run Germany's war is the war of the military 
caste of the world against the free peoples, the 
war of government holding power by force 
against government holding power by popular 
vote, the war of military establishment against 
peaceful ideals; and until it is won by those 
who fight Germany there can be no lasting 
peace in the world. 



CHAPTER IV 

HOW THE WAR CAME TO THE UNITED STATES 

The great war, beginning in 1914, brought 
to most Americans no idea that our country 
would ever be more than a watcher of it. That 
we ourselves would one day become part of 
it — and one of the greatest parts of it — was 
something beyond the imagination of most 
men. America had lived apart from other na- 
tions. For, although our government had made 
treaties with foreign nations, and become part 
of The Hague Conference, and been drawn to 
some extent into international politics, we had 
none of the ambitions which draw nations into 
ordinary wars. We had no desire for colonies, 
we had no jealousy of other nations, we had 
no fear of neighboring governments. In fact, 
Americans believed that wars were going out 
of fashion, and that western Europe, any more 
than ourselves, was not likely to go to war. 

65 



66 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

The coming of the conflict was therefore a shock 
to us, but not one that brought us to reahze 
that we were likely to take part in it. 

When Germany invaded Belgium with no 
excuse other than that progress through that 
nation afforded the quickest way to France 
the people of the United States awoke to their 
first knowledge of what militarism may mean. 
Although people of German birth or parentage 
in America were inclined to accept Germany's 
attempted justification of military necessity, 
the sympathies of most Americans went to 
Belgium and became one of the important fac- 
tors in determining the country's attitude 
toward the war. For the United States had 
always stood for principles of justice and hu- 
manitarianism. The stories of how Germany 
treated the civilian population of Belgium, 
stories which were verified by the later reports 
of such non-partisan investigators as Brand 
Whitlock, American minister to Belgium, 
aroused American sentiment against German 
military methods. 




c s 



HOW THE WAR CAME TO US 67 

There were people in the United States 
who beheved that our country should go to 
war in defense of Belgium, just as we had gone 
to war to free Cuba from the dominion of Spain 
when the rule of Spain on that island became 
cruelly oppressive. But our government, be- 
lieving that the war was not a parallel instance, 
since it had not yet violated those fundamental 
principles of our national life that had been 
struck at by Spain, refused to consider such 
action, and the people fell back into considera- 
tion of the causes and progress of the war 
abroad. 

It began to be clear, as German forces 
crossed Belgium and plunged into France, while 
at the same time German forces swept east- 
ward, that Germany had evolved the definite 
scheme of world conquest which her later de- 
mands and movements have proven. The 
American people, however, were slow to believe 
this intention of Germany. Bit by bit only our 
country began to see that Germany was push- 
ing forward a gigantic plan of territorial ag- 



68 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

gression, and with all that we heard and some 
that we believed, we were slow to see how this 
plan could affect the United States. 

Because we had lived apart from the rest 
of the world we would probably have continued 
to feel that, terrible as the war which Germany 
had begun was, it was not our war, and that 
all we were expected to do was to remain 
genuinely neutral and to give such assistance 
as the international law permitted neutral na- 
tions to give the wounded and stricken. But 
Germany would not allow us to remain apart. 
The ruling class of Prussia, headed by the 
Kaiser, grown mad with power and the desire 
for more power, put into operation methods 
that forced us toward war. 

Germany's progress into this war had, as 
we have seen, struck blows at those principles 
for which America had struggled, the principles 
of individual freedom, of international peace, 
of the freedom of the seas. For any one of these 
ideals the republic might have rushed into war; 
but it was only when the American people came 



HOW THE WAR CAME TO US 69 

to know that Germany was plotting not only 
to overthrow the Monroe Doctrine but actually 
against the American Government here in the 
United States that we were roused to desire 
for conflict to uphold our national honor. 

"It is plain enough how we were forced 
into war," President Wilson declared in his Flag 
Day Address of June 14, 1917. "The extraor- 
dinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial 
German Government left us no self-respecting 
choice but to take up arms in defense of our 
rights as a free people and of our honor as a 
sovereign government. The military masters 
of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. 
They filled our unsuspecting communities with 
vicious spies and conspirators and sought to 
corrupt the opinions of our people in their own 
behalf. When they found that they could not 
do that, their agents diligently spread sedition 
amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens 
from their allegiance; and some of those agents 
were men connected with the official embassy 
of the German Government in our own capital. 



70 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

"They sought by violence to destroy our 
industries and arrest our commerce. They 
tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against 
us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance 
with her; and that, not by indirection, but by 
direct suggestion from the Foreign Office in 
Berlin. They impudently denied us the use of 
the high seas and repeatedly executed their 
threat that they would send to their death any 
of our people who ventured to approach the 
coasts of Europe. 

"Many of our own people were corrupted. 
Men began to look upon their own neighbors 
with suspicion and to wonder in their hot re- 
sentment whether there was any community 
in which hostile intrigue did not lurk. What 
great nation in such circumstances would not 
have taken up arms? Much as we desired 
peace, it was denied us, and not of our own 
choice. The flag under which we serve would 
have been dishonored had we withheld our 
hand." 

The President of the United States stated 



HOW THE WAR CAME TO US 71 

America's case against Germany mildly. Evi- 
dence of the bad faith of the government of 
Germany to the government of the United 
States is piled in the archives of the State De- 
partment in Washington. The honest efforts 
of our government to establish honest rela- 
tions with them were met by German officials 
with quibbles, misrepresentations, counter-ac- 
cusations, and continuing, deliberate delays. 
German high officials kept us in humiliating 
waiting while German official agents in this 
country, protected by the rules of diplomatic 
immunity from criminal prosecution, used their 
trust to conspire against our internal peace. 
Agents of the German Embassy placed spies 
through the length and breadth of our country. 
They put their agents at work in Japan and in 
Latin America while they were professing to 
be our friends. They bought newspapers and 
employed speakers for the purpose of rousing 
distrust of us in those countries. They incited 
insurrection in Cuba, in Haiti, and in Santo 
Domingo. They did their best to arouse against 



72 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

US the Danish West Indies. They spread sus- 
picion of us and our motives in South America. 
They conducted an attack upon the Monroe 
Doctrine such as no other nation had ever at- 
tempted. 

For a time the government of the United 
States tried to take the view that this intrigue, 
plotting, spying, and insidious warfare was the 
work of irresponsible agents, not countenanced 
by the Imperial German Government; but 
the proof was too strong. The government 
finally had to request the recall of the Austro- 
Hungarian ambassador and of the German 
military and naval attaches, presenting proof 
of their criminal violations of our hospitality. 
Their governments offered no reply to us, issued 
no reprimands to them. 

In spite of all this the temper of the Amer- 
ican people was that we should keep out of 
war as long as it was possible to maintain our 
national honor without war. The President 
even began the preparation of a communication 
to the warring nations, asking them to define 



HOW THE WAR CAME TO US 73 

their war aims, as this would be a step toward 
peace. Before this note was completed, the 
German Government sent out a communication, 
asking the same dejQnition. But the German 
Government issued this document on the idea 
that the German armies had triumphed, and 
incorporated in it a threat to neutral govern- 
ments. From a thousand sources, official and 
unoJBficial, word came to our government that 
unless the United States used her influence to 
end the war on the terms dictated by Germany, 
Germany and her allies would consider them- 
selves free from obligation to respect the rights 
of neutrals. The Kaiser was frankly ordering 
the neutral nations of the world to force those 
Powers which fought him to accept the peace 
he offered. If they failed to do this, Germany 
would resume her submarine warfare on neutral 
commerce with new ruthlessness. 

The President, continuing his own purpose, 
finished his note to both sides, sending it on the 
18th of December, 1916. Both sides replied, the 
Powers who resisted Germany declaring that 



74 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

their principal end in the war was the lasting 
restoration of peace. Germany and her associ- 
ates refused to state their terms, and merely 
proposed a conference — another method of de- 
lay. The President, in an address to the Senate 
on the 22d of January, 1917, outlined the terms 
of the peace which the United States could hon- 
orably join in guaranteeing. 

*'No peace can last," he stated, *'or ought 
to last, which does not recognize and accept 
the principle that governments derive all their 
just powers from the consent of the governed, 
and that no right anywhere exists to hand people 
about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if 
they were property. . . . 

"I am proposing government by the con- 
sent of the governed; that freedom of the seas 
which in international conference after con- 
ference representatives of the United States 
have urged with the eloquence of those who 
are the convinced disciples of liberty; and 
that moderation of armaments which makes of 
armies and navies a power for order merely. 



HOW THE WAR CAME TO US 75 

not an instrument of aggression or of selfish 
violence." 

Six days earlier, on the 16th of January, the 
German secretary of foreign affairs had secretly 
despatched a communication to the German 
minister in Mexico, informing him that Ger- 
many intended to repudiate its pledge made 
to the United States to discontinue submarine 
warfare on neutral ships, and instructing him 
to offer to the Mexican Government New Mex- 
ico and Arizona if Mexico would join with Japan 
in attacking the United States. 

On the last day of January, 1917, the Ger- 
man ambassador to the United States, Count 
Bernstorff, brought to the secretary of state 
a note in which Germany announced her pur- 
pose of intensifying her submarine warfare. 
The German chancellor stated in Germany 
that the reason that this policy had not been 
put into force earlier was simply because his 
government had not been ready to act. 

On the 3d of February, 1917, the Presi- 
dent announced to both houses of Congress 



76 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

the complete severance of our relations with 
Germany. Count Bernstorff went to Berlin, 
and James W. Gerard, American ambassador 
to Germany, was recalled to this country. 
Count Bernstorff had begged that no irrevocable 
decision of war be made until he had the chance 
to make one final plea for peace to the Kaiser. 
If he made the plea, he failed. The submarine 
warfare began again in greater violence. And 
on the twelfth day of March our government 
ordered the placing of armed guards on our 
merchant ships. 

With the Sixty-fourth Congress dissolved 
on the 4th of March, we had come to the 
door of the greatest war in the history of the 
world. 



CHAPTER V 

HOW THE UNITED STATES WENT INTO WAR 

One hundred and thirty years before the 
great war of Europe came to the threshold of 
the United States a group of wise, far-sighted 
statesmen met in the city of Philadelphia to 
make a constitution for the governing of the 
Colonies whose independence had just been 
won. They desired, above all things, to estab- 
lish a government which would stand the test 
of time and remain a government of the people, 
by the people, and for the people. For months 
they deliberated, bringing to the meetings all 
the wisdom, all the ideals, all the visioning they 
had acquired from long study, and from vic- 
torious, righteous warfare. Finally they — the 
fathers of our republic — completed a document 
that has governed the United States of America 
and become to the world a model of democratic 
government. 

77 



78 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

In this document, which was ratified by 
the States then existing and which became the 
law of those States which were admitted to the 
nation, its makers set down certain rules govern- 
ing the making of war. 

The Constitution divided the government 
into three branches: the executive, the legis- 
lative, and the judicial. In order that no one 
of them might have too much power, the duties 
of each were determined and divided. The 
executive, of which the President is chief, could 
do certain deeds and duties. The judicial had 
the final determination of the right of enacting 
certain laws, saying whether or not later laws, 
made by Congress, conformed to the original 
Constitution. But to the legislative, represented 
by two houses of Congress, the Senate and the 
House of Representatives, the Constitution 
granted certain very clear powers. 

Among these powers was the power to de- 
clare war. In autocracies monarchs declare 
war; but in a democracy such as ours it is right 
and just that the power of declaring war should 



HOW WE WENT INTO THE WAR 79 

rest with that body most directly responsive 
to the people of the nation. The Congress is 
such a body. The Constitution therefore gave 
to Congress the right of war declaration; and 
nothing better illustrates the difference between 
autocracy and democracy than the fact that 
the Emperor of Germany had thrust his coun- 
try into war three days before the German 
Reichstag^ which is the limited popular assembly 
of the empire, knew officially of its existence, 
while the President of the United States had 
to suznmon Congress into special session for 
consideration of the war problem. 

On the second day of April, 1917, the Presi- 
dent went before the Congress which he had 
summoned. Beneath the dome of the white 
Capitol in the city of Washington, while a world 
waited breathlessly for the verdict of the great 
nation, he read his message to the men who 
represent the people of the United States. In 
that message he set down the case of the United 
States against Germany. Only twice before 
in the history of America — at the beginning 



80 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

of the War of the Revolution and at the be- 
ginning of the war between the States — had 
there been so momentous an occasion. Upon 
the men assembled in the Senate and the House 
of Representatives depended the honor, the 
future of the nation, and the honor and the 
future of democracy. 

"It is a war," the President read to them, 
"against all nations. . . . The challenge is to 
all mankind. Each nation must decide for 
itself how it will meet it. The choice we make 
for ourselves must be made with a moderation 
of counsel and a tempera teness of judgment 
befitting our character and our motives as a 
nation. We must put excited feelings away. 
Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious 
assertion of the physical might of the nation, 
but only the vindication of right, of human 
right, of which we are only a single champion." 

In that spirit the Congress listened. In 
that spirit they heard the voice of the man who 
was speaking not for himself but for our United 
States, not for our generation alone but for the 



HOW WE WENT INTO THE WAR 81 

generations who have passed and the genera- 
tions who will come, when he said: 

"The world must be made safe for democ- 
racy. Its peace must be planted upon the 
tested foundations of political liberty. We 
have nb selfish ends to serve. We desire no 
conquests, no dominion. We seek no indemni- 
ties for ourselves, no material compensations 
for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We 
are but one of the champions of the rights of 
mankind. We shall be satisfied when those 
rights have been made as secure as the faith 
and the freedom of nations can make them." 

With the weight of the gravest responsibility 
an American Congress has ever raised falling 
upon their shoulders, they gave heed as the 
chief executive brought to them the issue: 

"It is a distressing and oppressive duty, 
gentlemen of the Congress, which I have per- 
formed in thus addressing you. There are, it 
may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice 
ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this 
great, peaceful people into war, into the most 



82 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization 
itself seeming to be in the balance. But the 
right is more precious than peace, and we shall 
fight for the things which we have always carried 
nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right 
of those who submit to authority to have a 
voice in their own governments, for the rights 
and liberties of small nations, for a universal 
dominion of right by such a concert of free 
people as shall bring peace and safety to all 
nations and make the world itself at last 
free. 

"To such a task we can dedicate our lives 
and our fortunes, everything that we are and 
everything that we have, with the pride of those 
who know that the day has come when America 
is privileged to spend her blood and her might 
for the principles that gave her birth and hap- 
piness, and the peace which she has treasured. 
"God helping her, she can do no other." 
The Congress of the United States deliber- 
ated, through three days and three nights, while 
the world waited, upon the question of war. 



HOW WE WENT INTO THE WAR 83 

On the 2d of April, the very day of the Presi- 
dent's message, the war declaration passed the 
Senate with a vote of 82 yeas and 6 nays. On 
the 5th of April, it passed the House of Rep- 
resentatives with a vote of 373 yeas and 70 
nays. America had spoken, and the voice of 
America thundered this message to Germany: 

"Whereas the Imperial German Govern- 
ment has committed repeated acts of war against 
the Government and the people of the United 
States of America: Therefore be it 

^^ Resolved by the Senate and House of Repre- 
sentatives of the United States of America in Con- 
gress assembled, That the state of war between 
the United States and the Imperial German 
Government which has thus been thrust upon 
the United States is hereby formally declared; 
and that the President be, and he is hereby, 
authorized and directed to employ the entire 
naval and military forces of the United States 
and the resources of the Government to carry 
on war against the Imperial German Govern- 
ment; and to bring the conflict to a successful 



84 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

termination all the resources of the country- 
are hereby pledged by the Congress of the 
United States." 

The United States of America had gone 
into its greatest war. 



CHAPTER VI 

WHAT THE UNITED STATES IS DOING IN 
THE WAR 

When a military nation of the type of Ger- 
many goes into war the entrance is but a step 
forward out of the preparations which it has 
been making for years; but when a peace- 
loving, peace-observing nation of the type of 
the United States goes into war the entrance 
is a revolution in the thoughts, habits, and in- 
tentions of the people. 

The declaration by Congress of the existence 
of a state of war with Germany found the United 
States with the greatest resources of any nation 
in the world but without the sort of military 
machinery necessary for prosecution of the 
conflict. The readjustment of the nation from 
ordinary occupations into war-making occu- 
pations has been a gigantic task, and one that 
has been accomplished only through the in- 

85 



86 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

telligent patriotism of the citizens of the na- 
tion, co-operating with the government. 

The first concern of the nation was the in- 
crease of our army and navy to a size commen- 
surate to the part we were about to take in the 
conflict. Neither the army nor the navy came 
near to the strength which the nation knew to 
be imperative for the winning of the war. For, 
although the exact part which the United States 
would take in the struggle was to be determined 
later by conferences with the war councils of 
the other nations fighting Germany, it was 
certain that we would require a vast army and 
an adequate navy. 

Congress having voted that the United 
States should undertake extensive military 
preparation, the duty of providing that prep- 
aration fell upon the executive branch of our 
government. It was provided that the army 
of the United States should consist of the Reg- 
ular Army, the National Guard, and the 
National Army. The law provides that, when 
these armies are assembled, there shall be no 



THE UNITED STATES IN THE WAR 87 

difference between the Regular Army, the Na- 
tional Guard, and the National Army. Every 
man in the army, no matter in what service, 
is equal in dignity, in responsibility, and in 
opportunity to every other rnan of the same 
rank in the army. 

The first year of the conflict has been largely 
occupied with the assembling of these armies, 
and in the despatch of those trained for battle 
duty to France. To insure this despatch in 
safety the navy has been greatly increased in 
size and efficiency, although it stands to the 
honor of America that her navy proved itself 
instantly worthy of her trust. 

With the beginning of the war there was a 
rush of men to enlist in the Regular Army and 
in the National Guard, which was to be part 
of the army of the United States. The govern- 
ment, however, decided upon a method of ser- 
vice, known as selective service and sometimes 
called ".the draft," which would be more dem- 
ocratic and fair than the enlistment method, and 
which would supplement the other methods. 



88 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

The selective-service law, passed by Congress 
on the 18th of May, 1917, established a class of 
men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty- 
one from which the President may draft soldiers. 
All men between those ages were enrolled on the 
5th of June, 1917. The administration of the 
draft is in the hands of the War Department 
under the supervision of the President. Every 
voting district has a local draft board, and every 
congressional district a board of appeal, which 
decides contested cases. All men between the 
ages given are subject to service, unless they are 
exempted for reasons allowed by law. No ex- 
emptions can be bought. No substitutions can 
be made. The richest man in the country of 
draft age is as subject to service as the poorest 
man. Exemptions are permitted those men who 
are supporting dependants who cannot support 
themselves, those men who are working in occu- 
pations necessary for the winning of the war, 
such as ship-building and the making of muni- 
tions of war, and those men who are physically 
unfit for war service. 



THE UNITED STATES IN THE WAR 89 

In the registration 9,659,382 men enrolled. 
By a drawing system conducted publicly in 
the Capitol of the United States at Washington 
the order by which these men were to go in 
the army was determined by lot. The Presi- 
dent issued instructions to the exemption boards 
on the 2d of July, and the first National Army 
of 687,000 men was called to service on the 5th 
of September, 1917. 

Following this call every man in the rest 
of the nearly 10,000,000 men received a docu- 
ment, known as a questionnaire, which gave a 
number of questions to be answered, and which 
he filled out. According to his answers the local 
board determined to what class he belongs. 
There are five groups of selective service, ranged 
according to a man's obligations and his occupa- 
tion. Single men without dependent relatives 
head the first class. Licensed pilots, who are 
so necessary to navigation as to be almost in- 
dispensable, end the last class. No fairer system 
of military service was ever devised. 

For the training of this army arrangements 



90 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

had to be made. The government set about 
the building of camps, called cantonments, for 
the use of the National Guard and the National 
Army while their various units were being pre- 
pared for service abroad. Most of these camps 
are in the South so that the men may have less 
hardship during the winter season. Some of 
the camps were completed in September, 1917. 
The construction of every camp was a great 
engineering achievement. Camp Meade is the 
second largest city of Maryland, and every 
camp is in itself a great community. There are 
thirty-three of these camps, or cantonments, 
extending from Atlantic to Pacific and from 
the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border in 
their locations. Here the men are trained into 
service, and cared for in various ways while 
they are being trained. 

Training-camps for officers were also estab- 
lished where men were taught the science of 
warfare and the leading of other men. In ad- 
dition to the army, training-camps for the United 
States marines, who are in the naval service. 



THE UNITED STATES IN THE WAR 91 

were established. Special branches of service, 
such as aviation, had special camps. 

On the fourth day of July, 1917, the news 
came to the United States that the first divi- 
sion of the American Expeditionary Forces, 
under the command of General John Pershing, 
had landed in France. American troops began 
intensive training with French and British 
soldiers, and when they were judged ready, 
took their places on the battle-lines. Day after 
day the casualty lists have recorded the deaths 
and injuries of American soldiers in the war. 
Our country is paying the price for the liberty we 
have enjoyed, and which we struggle to hold. 

Every day sees new divisions sailing east- 
ward on their way to Europe. The shipyards 
of the country are busy night and day in the 
building of ships to convoy troops and supplies 
to the battle-fronts, and to the countries of the 
peoples who fight with us against Germany. 

For upon the United States has fallen the 
task, not only of supplying men for fighting with 
the men of France and Great Britain on the 



92 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

western front, but of supplying food, clothing, 
and ammunition. Depleted by the years of dev- 
astating warfare, our fellow fighters look to us 
for sustenance. And we are not failing them. 
One of the sinews of war is money. Nations 
must raise vast sums to keep up armies. Sol- 
diers must be fed and clothed, and given guns 
and bullets with which to defend themselves. 
If they have families at home, their families 
must be supported. The government of the 
United States does all this for the men in its 
army and navy. And the people of the United 
States stand back of the government to pay 
for these needs. Besides the government, cer- 
tain private enterprises are aiding the soldiers, 
sailors, and all the victims of war abroad, as 
well as those needing aid at home for various 
reasons connected with the change that war 
brings. Only a certain percentage of our pop- 
ulation may go overseas to fight, but to every 
American is given the opportunity of standing 
back of the lines and doing the part asked of 
him. 



CHAPTER VII 

REAR-LINE TRENCHES 

Back of the firing-lines of battle are other 
lines which must be held by the fighting na- 
tions, if a war is to be won. These lines, which 
may be called the rear-line trenches of conflict, 
are the means of supply by which the armies 
at the front are fed and clothed, and given am- 
munition, and cared for in every way that will 
make them better soldiers. It is on these lines 
that the civilian population of a nation gives 
help to the fighting men. It is in these trenches 
that the men, and women, and children of a 
country may do their part for the soldiers and 
sailors who have to go into the actual battles. 

Because the United States is a democracy, 
fighting in a great struggle for the principles 
of democracy, it follows that our country has 
enlisted the service of every American to win 
the war. There is no one in the nation who 

93 



94 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

may not help, since every one may do some- 
thing to give actual, immediate, necessary aid 
to the men at the front, and those who are on 
their way to the front. 

This aid has been given, and is being given, 
in many ways. Through food conservation. 
Liberty Loans, War Thrift and Savings Stamps 
and Certificates, the Red Cross, the Young 
Men's Christian Association, the Young Men's 
Hebrew Association, the Knights of Columbus, 
the Young Women's Christian Association, and 
various other organizations which are working 
for the welfare of the soldiers, sailors, and ma- 
rines, almost every person in the United States 
old enough to understand that the country is 
at war has helped toward the winning of the 
war. 

Some of these methods, such as food con- 
servation, and the raising of money through 
Liberty Loans and the sale of W^ar Thrift 
Stamps, have been used directly by the govern- 
ment. Others have been semi-private enter- 
prises with governmental sanction. All of them 



REAR-LINE TRENCHES 95 

have been for the purpose of helping the men 
who have been doing the actual fighting, so 
that every one in the nation who has done what 
he could for these causes has been fighting his 
country's battles in the trenches back of the 
front. 

Food Conservation 

Napoleon, the one-time Emperor of the 
French and the greatest general of modern war- 
fare, said that "an army travelled on its stom- 
ach." He meant that no army could go faster 
than its food -supply. Although the method of 
warfare has changed since the century ago when 
he fought, the truth of his statement remains. 
No army can win battles unless it is properly fed. 

When the United States went into the great 
war the government of our country knew that 
a vast amount of certain kinds of food must 
be shipped abroad to feed those soldiers whom 
we would send across and those soldiers of the 
nations on whose side we were to fight against 
Germany. France and Belgium, devastated by 



96 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

the invading armies of the Germans, could 
not raise food enough for their own popula- 
tions, to say nothing of the defending armies. 
England, with her men fighting abroad, and 
with only a comparatively small area of farm- 
ing land, could not do much more. Canada 
was sending millions of bushels of wheat and 
thousands of tons of other food-supplies monthly 
to the Allies, but the need was infinitely greater 
than the supply. It therefore became the first 
duty of our country to send to those nations 
which were fighting in the same cause all the 
food which we could possibly spare, in order 
that their soldiers, and our soldiers when they 
came, would be properly fed. 

Although the United States produces great 
quantities of food products every year, only 
certain kinds of food could be sent abroad. 
It was necessary to send the kind of food that 
would take up the least space in shipment and 
have the greatest nourishment. The greatest 
demand was for wheat, and even our country 
could not — without saving at home — send to 



REAR-LINE TRENCHES 97 

Europe as much as was required. In order 
that the people of the United States might be 
taught how to save wheat and other foods needed 
for our troops and the AUies, the government 
established a food administration for the double 
purpose of taking over this instruction and of 
devising other methods of food saving. The 
success of both branches of service has been 
due to the intelligent co-operation of the Amer- 
ican people with the officers of the food ad- 
ministration; but it has been in the actual 
savings by individual Americans that the sum 
of sacrifice has been attained. 

It may not seem a soldier's duty to refrain 
from eating white bread on certain days desig- 
nated by the government. It may not seem 
a patriot's duty to keep from eating sugar or 
pork on other days; but it is none the less a 
duty as certain as that one which his command- 
ing officer assigns to the soldier in the ranks, 
and one which should be as carefully followed. 
The following of it has enabled the United States 
to ship abroad wheat, pork, sugar, and other 



98 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

foodstuff in quantities sufficient to keep fed the 
people who are actually fighting the enemy. 
The man, woman, or child who has saved at 
home the kind of food that the government 
has needed to send abroad, and who has used 
the substitutes, has done a patriotic duty and 
his share of keeping the rear-line trench where 
he is placed. 

Fuel Conservation 

Coal is one of the essential means of making 
war. Without coal ships cannot cross the seas, 
bearing soldiers. Without coal the great fac- 
tories where guns and bullets, powder and 
cannon, uniforms and equipment are made 
for our army and navy could not run. Because 
of many reasons there was during 1917 a short- 
age of 50,000,000 tons of coal. The govern- 
ment therefore appointed a fuel administrator 
for the purpose of finding ways to make up 
this shortage so that ships would not be de- 
layed nor factories stopped where munitions 
for om* soldiers and sailors were being made. 



REAR-LINE TRENCHES 99 

The fuel administrator ordered the shutting 
down of the use of electric lights where these 
were not absolutely needed, and also, when the 
shortage was most acute, the shutting down 
of all factories not employed in munitions- 
making for a certain period of time. This was 
why there were so-called "lightless" nights and 
'*coalless" days. The people were also asked 
to save fuel in their homes as much as possible. 
The result was a saving of fuel that was used 
for war purpose directly. 

War Finance 

In the old days, when Kings hired men of 
other nations to help their own armies fight 
their wars, it used to be said that the victory 
went to that side which had the most money. 
Some wars where countries with practically 
no money fought against rich nations and de- 
feated them, because of superior valor and 
courage of their men, proved that it was not 
money, but men, which won wars. The fact 
remains, however, that money is absolutely 



100 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

necessary for any country to carry a war to 
success. Soldiers must be fed and clothed, 
and given guns and bullets and cannon, as 
well as proper care. All this takes money. 

A government has two ways of raising 
money. One of these ways, the older way, is 
by taxation. The government says to the 
citizen: *'You have property worth so much 
money. We shall require you to give us a cer- 
tain percentage of that money. You have an 
income of so many dollars. We shall take from 
you part of it, according to your wealth." Or 
the government may put a tax on tea, or coffee, 
or clothes, or any other article which people 
use. All this is perfectly right and legal as a 
means of raising money for the prosecution of 
a war in which the government must direct the 
people, to win. 

The other method of raising money by the 
government is the sale of bonds. Bonds are 
really promises made by a corporation to pay 
at a certain stated time, with interest, the 
amount which the purchaser gives for them. 



REAR-LINE TRENCHES 101 

For instance, when a railroad company wants to 
get money enough to make some necessary im- 
provements, it issues bonds at a certain rate of 
interest, payable at a certain time. If the im- 
provements help the railroad, and the company 
makes money by having done this, the person 
who buys the bond usually finds that his pur- 
chase has increased in value because of the cer- 
tainty of the interest payments. It is this 
certainty of payment, both principal and inter- 
est, which has always made United States 
bonds such good investments. It is not hard 
for a man who has good property to secure a 
mortgage upon it. 

The United States is the richest country 
in the world. The government of the United 
States has at its command the greatest re- 
sources of any nation. Therefore, the govern- 
ment could raise more money than any other 
agency. 

When the war came to our country, the 
government had the choice of raising money 
by taxation or by the sale of bonds. In order 



102 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

to make the task as easy on the people as pos- 
sible the government, through its officers, de- 
cided to combine the systems. Through the 
Internal Revenue Bureau of the Treasury of 
the United States the government set about 
the collection of taxes imposed by Congress, 
and designed to raise money for the winning 
of the war. And the secretary of the treasury 
announced the opening of the first Liberty 
Loan. 

The Liberty Loans are really bond sales. 
Through them the government sells to the 
people bonds, which are promises to pay the 
money which the government borrows. These 
bonds are promises to pay the purchasers at 
the end of a certain number of years the 
amount which they pay for them. In the 
meantime they pay semi-annual interest. These 
bonds are investments. Buying them is not 
making a gift to the government. It is, rather, 
letting the government make a gift to you. 

In order to have money enough to purchase 
bonds, however, hundreds of thousands of people 



REAR-LINE TRENCHES 103 

have had to make sacrifices during the course 
of the Liberty Loans; and it is only when they 
have made sacrifice, when they have given up 
clothes they wanted, or vacations they thought 
they needed, or pleasure they would have sought, 
that they are really doing something for the 
country. But so many millions of men and 
women and children have bought Liberty Bonds 
and are continuing to buy Liberty Bonds that 
their purchase has become one of the great pa- 
triotic movements of our country in this war. 

In the War of the Revolution, Robert Morris, 
of Philadelphia, loaned money to General Wash- 
ington's army. History has made famous his 
name because he had faith enough in his coun- 
try and love enough for his country to loan 
money to her in the hour of her need. In this 
great war every man, every woman, every boy, 
every girl in the United States has the oppor- 
tunity of becoming a Robert Morris. 

For, although the lowest denomination of 
a Liberty Bond is fifty dollars, the government 
has devised a method by which every one who 



104 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

has any money at all can help in the war. The 
treasury has issued War Thrift Stamps and 
War Savings Certificates so that any one who 
has money at all — no matter how little — may 
do his share. The stamps may be bought al- 
most everywhere for twenty-five cents. In 
January, 1918, a certificate cost $4.12. In 
every month which followed it cost one cent 
more. But it will bring back to the holder of 
it in 1923 five dollars. The stamps may be 
exchanged for certificates, as soon as the saver 
has enough of them, with the odd amount added, 
to make the purchase. 

Since every one in the nation who has twenty- 
five cents may buy a Thrift Stamp, it is almost 
certain that every one in the United States 
can help the government win the war by making 
the purchase. And it is by the individual efforts 
that the money will be raised, and the war won. 

The Red Cross 

From an auxiliary branch of a great or- 
ganization the American Red Cross has become 



REAR-LINE TRENCHES 105 

one of the great agencies of the war. Before 
the United States entered the conflict, the Amer- 
ican Red Cross had been the great rehef agency 
among the peoples of the stricken districts of 
western Europe. Food, clothing, a new chance 
at life had been given the stricken. Back of 
the battle-fields the soldiers, wounded in the 
struggles, were cared for. Even in Germany 
the American Red Cross had made easier the 
lot of the prisoners of war. With our entrance 
into the war the organization became one of 
the great factors in our country's means of 
caring for the welfare of our fighters. 

The American Red Cross, of which the Presi- 
dent of the United States is honorary chairman, 
is the means through which volunteer aid is 
given to the sick and wounded men of the army 
and navy, to sufferers in the war zones, and 
to the families of men in the service. 

There are two classes of Red Cross service, 
civilian and military. The civilian relief in- 
cludes the care and education of destitute chil- 
dren in the war zone, the care of mutilated sol- 



106 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

diers, the care of sick and wounded soldiers, 
the rehef of the devastated districts of France 
and Belgium, aid for prisoners of war and 
civilians sent back from bondage in Germany 
to France and Belgium, and the prevention of 
tuberculosis. It also includes care for the 
families of soldiers and sailors beyond the aid 
given by the government. Military relief es- 
tablishes and maintains hospitals ior sick and 
wounded soldiers in the American army in 
France, and canteens, rest-houses, recreation- 
huts for American soldiers and also for the 
soldiers of the other nations at war with Ger- 
many. 

In the equipment of the hospitals and in 
the other relief work done by the Red Cross 
a very great number of special articles, such 
as bandages, garments, and other articles re- 
quiring skill in the making were needed. Al- 
most every woman and child in the United 
States has been at work since the beginning 
of the war in making something for the Red 
Cross, so that this semi -governmental activity 



REAR-LINE TRENCHES 107 

has become one of the most wide-spread forces 
in providing comforts and necessaries for our 
army and navy, as well as for the relief of con- 
ditions in the war zone. 

Welfare Work 

Both in the camps at home and in the 
trenches abroad the soldier needs something be- 
sides the routine life provided for him by the 
government. In order to give him recreation 
and pleasures, so that his life may be normal 
even when he is away from home, several or- 
ganizations have been at work since the be- 
ginning of the war. The Commission on Train- 
ing-Camp Activities, the Young Men's Christian 
Association, with its attendant Young Men's 
Hebrew Association, the Knights of Columbus, 
and the Jewish Welfare Board have been among 
the many who have been working to make the 
fighting men happier. These organizations have 
built rest-houses and recreation-huts for the 
men. They have given entertainments for 
them. They have supplied them with comforts, 



108 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

and have kept up a high moraHty among them. 
The United Service Clubs have also been busy- 
in providing good lodgings for soldiers and 
sailors when they have been out of the camps on 
leave. The Young Women's Christian Associa- 
tion has also done splendid work both for the 
men in the camps and for their visiting relatives. 
In addition to the large organizations smaller 
ones are busy all over the country in aiding the 
soldiers. Almost every town has some group 
of people who are giving service to the men in 
the camps. In every city and town through 
which the troop-trains have passed on their 
way from the camps to the harbors where the 
soldiers would be placed on board the trans- 
ports, women have fixed food for the men, and 
children have aided them in carrying this food 
to the stations. Large sums have been raised 
to carry on the recreation service in the camps, 
both here and in France, and the response of 
the American people to any request for the 
soldiers and sailors has been speedy and in- 
spiring. 



REAR-LINE TRENCHES 109 

The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts of the 
United States have been noteworthy in their 
work for our country. Three hundred and 
twenty thousand Boy Scouts aided in the work 
of seUing the bonds of the Third Liberty Loan 
and of the sale of War Thrift Stamps. The Girl 
Scouts have done all sorts of clerical and special 
work for the same cause, as well as for various 
others. The children of every public school 
and almost every private school in the United 
States have worked in some cause or another 
for the winning of the war. With the men and 
women of the country they have earned their 
place on the patriots' roll. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE AMERICAN'S PART 

Entering the great war after it had al- 
ready waged for nearly three years, the United 
States learned many of the lessons that experi- 
ence had taught to the Allies, and outlined a 
programme that was designed to promote speed 
and efficiency. Every programme that is de- 
pendent upon human action is, of course, im- 
perfect; but the programme of our country in 
this war has, at least, given to the citizens of 
our land opportunity for service in the prosecu- 
tion of the war. No man, woman, or child in 
the nation need be idle or useless. He has the 
chance now of helping his country as he has 
had in no other time in her history. 

Why should the American help America .^^ 
There is, to begin with, in the soul of every 
human being a love of country that should 
come next to a love of God. Love of country 

110 




W -5 



THE AMERICAN'S PART 111 

is not only next to love of God, but is part of 
genuine love of God. No man who loves his 
God sincerely fails to love his country. Even 
those countries which have not been kind or 
just, or fair to their peoples, countries where 
men are not given the chance for freedom or 
opportunity, have their patriots. But the 
United States of America, more than any other 
country in the world, has given to her people 
liberty, justice, opportunity, freedom. It is, 
therefore, the grateful duty of every American 
to do what he can to keep his country what 
she has been. 

For those men who are in the army or navy 
the duty is clear. They are making the supreme 
sacrifice in standing ready to give their lives in 
the defense of our nation. For those who stay 
at home the path may not be as plain, but it 
is there, and no one should fail to find it and 
travel upon it, for it is the road of patriotism, 
and patriotism is a divine duty. 

The United States, as we have seen, entered 
the war to uphold those principles of right which 



112 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

all great Americans, from Washington and 
Patrick Henry to Abraham Lincoln, have cher- 
ished. For freedom of the seas, for the safe- 
keeping of the Monroe Doctrine, for the right 
of arbitration in international disputes, for the 
right of small nations to govern themselves, for 
the preservation of those free institutions of 
democracy which the autocracy of Germany 
strives to conquer, our nation took up the 
burden of conflict. While it is the first war in 
which we have sent our troops to foreign soil, 
it is a war in keeping with the basic principles 
of our nationality. It is being fought for the 
same freedom for which the thirteen Colonies 
fought in the War of the Revolution. It is 
being fought for the same maritime right for 
which the War of 1812 was fought. Both these 
struggles were, it is true, against England, who 
is now our cobelligerent in the war against Ger- 
many. By our winning of those wars the 
United States helped the people of England to 
see that light for which they are now sacrificing 
everything. There were men in England, even 



THE AMERICAN'S PART 113 

in the times of the War of the Revolution and 
in the War of 1812, who beheved America right, 
and who proclaimed their belief in the halls of 
Westminster. Their courage and our success 
set beacons on the hills of history for the light- 
ing of those who followed. The same spirit that 
inspired our nation in its beginnings is the spirit 
that inspires not only ourselves but those against 
whom we fought until they, too, are fighting 
for it now on the fields of Flanders and France. 

It is a war which is being fought for the 
same basic principles on which the War of the 
States was fought in the sixties of the last cen- 
tury. For while the North fought for the free- 
dom of the slave, the South fought, not for his 
continuation in bondage, but for the rights of 
the separate States. Both issues were funda- 
mentally right. The greater — for the freedom 
of the individual is greater than the constitu- 
tional right of a State — triumphed. But the 
spirit of both is American, and part of our reason 
for entering this war. 

Since it is a war in keeping with American 



114 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

traditions, it is the part of the American, in 
service or out of it, to keep up the standard of 
our country in it. 

How shall he do it ? 

Every man sees his own duty clearest. But 
there are certain lines of life in which this duty 
is so clear that it is easy to mark. One of these 
lines is that of the American of foreign birth 
or parentage, now a citizen of the United States. 
Another is that of the families of officers and 
soldiers. A third is that of the industrial workers 
of the country. The men, women, and children 
in any one of these zones have definite standards 
to uphold. If they fail to do so, they are not 
less traitorous than the sentry who falls asleep 
at his post and lets the enemy in. 

The American of foreign birth or parentage 
is a citizen of this country because he or his 
parents saw that America offered an oppor- 
tunity which could not be secured in the old 
country. He is the recipient of favors of free- 
dom, liberty, and such wealth as he did not 
before enjoy. His allegiance is doubly owed. 



THE AMERICAN'S PART 115 

It is therefore his part to do everything in his 
power to prove his gratitude. It is his part to 
combat all disloyalty, to uproot all treason, to 
stand firm for American principles at home and 
abroad, to proclaim by word and deed his loyalty 
to our country. 

Because this is a war for democracy it is 
the part of every American to maintain that 
democracy at home and in deed as well as abroad 
and in word. Military organizations have a 
tendency to create distinctions, unless the peo- 
ple of the country keep close watch on them- 
selves. Military discipline must be maintained, 
but any line drawn between oflScer and private 
must end with discipline and not be carried 
into private life. The private in the ranks is 
as great an American, if he does his duty, as 
the general in command; and no one knows it 
better than the general. It is not in the army 
or navy, but in the civilian families of soldiers 
and sailors, that the danger lies. Therefore, 
it is the part of every member of these to bear 
in mind constantly and continuously that every 



116 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

man in the service is equal; that the commis- 
sioned officer is giving no more than the man 
in the ranks ; and that both are giving up every- 
thing else in life for the one thing of paramount 
importance, the winning of the war. "No snob- 
bery" is as good and as great an American watch- 
word as "Give me liberty, or give me death." 
For snobbery is the death of liberty as surely 
as the will of a tyrant. The "Junker" class 
of Prussia is the officer class who look down 
upon all others, and who have come to believe 
the world to have been made for their rule. 
We are fighting "Junkerism" in Europe. It 
is the American's part to fight the slightest 
trace of it at home. 

Every war has its home heroes as well as 
its field heroes. Since this war is, more than 
any other, a war of resources, it follows that 
the part of labor is more important than it has 
been in any previous war. If the working men 
and women of any one of the great warring 
nations should refuse to continue at work, that 
nation would be defeated as surely as if the 



THE AMERICAN'S PART 117 

armies had laid down their arms in the field. 
American victory is as dependent upon Amer- 
ican labor as it is upon American manhood. 
And it is with pride that it may be said that 
American labor has been found worthy of all 
American traditions. 

The United States has been pre-eminently 
the nation of the working man. Its legislation 
has continuously tended toward the better- 
ment of his condition. Nowhere else in the 
world has he enjoyed the lot that has been his 
in America. Nowhere else has he the voice, 
the power, the future that our nation accords 
him. And upon him in this war has fallen the 
duty of speeding up the war production of the 
country, a task so important that those men 
of draft age engaged in such occupations have 
been exempted from military service in order 
that they may continue at their work. For 
the making of munitions is as necessary as the 
firing of guns. 

It has become the duty of American labor to 
keep at the allotted tasks. No one must shirk. 



118 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

No one must fail. No one must delay. No 
matter how trivial the task may seem in the 
sum of the war work, it may be the one whose 
lack of doing may be the breach in the wall 
through which the enemy may enter. 

"For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost. 
For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost. 
For the want of a horse, the rider was lost. 
For the want of the rider, the message was lost. 
For the want of the message, the battle was lost. 
For the loss of the battle, the kingdom was lost. 
All for the want of the nail of a shoe." 

And the maker of the horseshoe was one of 
the factors of his country's defeat ! 

The civilian's part in this war has been out- 
lined by the President of the United States in 
his proclamation of the 16th of April, 1917: 

"These, then, are the things we must do 
and do well besides fighting — the things with- 
out which mere fighting would be fruitless; 
we must supply abundant food for ourselves, 
our armies, and our seamen, not only, but also 
for a large part of the nations with whom we 
have common cause, in whose support and by 



THE AMERICAN'S PART 119 

whose side we are fighting. We must supply 
ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to 
carry to the other side of the sea, submarines 
or no submarines, what will every day be needed 
there, and abundant materials out of our fields 
and our mines and our factories with which 
not only to cloak and equip our own forces on 
land and sea, but also to clothe and support 
our people for whom the gallant fellows under 
arms can no longer work; to help clothe and 
equip the armies with which we are co-operat- 
ing in Europe and to keep the looms and manu- 
factories there in raw materials; coal to keep 
the fires going in the ships at sea and in the 
furnaces of hundreds of factories across the 
sea; steel out of which to make arms and am- 
munition both here and there; rails for worn- 
out railways back of the fighting fronts; loco- 
motives and rolling-stock to take the places of 
those every day going to pieces; mules, horses, 
cattle, for labor and for military service; every- 
thing with which the people in England, France, 
Italy, and Russia have normally supplied them- 



120 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

selves, but cannot now afford the men, the 
materials, or the machinery to make." 

America is the factory of the world. The 
American who stays at home is the worker in 
the factory, and it is his part to do his work 
so well that the man who fights overseas for 
the same cause may hold his hand in the essen- 
tial brotherhood of equal service. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE UNITED STATES AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 

In the soul of every human being, no matter 
how clogged it be by traditions, lives the desire 
for freedom. It is this desire, this spark of 
fire, which has peopled the continent of America. 
For, long before the colonies revolted and estab- 
lished a republic the great territory which has 
become the United States beckoned to the 
peoples of the Old World a welcome to a land 
which would give them opportunity for the 
freedom they sought. The whole history of 
the American colonies is a history of the search 
of mankind for individual freedom in which to 
work out his ideals without governmental in- 
terference. Political refugees, religious refugees 
dared the dangers of the ocean to come to the 
new land that they might live and worship as 
their souls urged them. 

The settlement of Massachusetts was made 

121 



122 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

by the Puritans of England who were seeking 
a refuge from the oppression they had suffered 
in England on account of their religious beliefs 
and practices. They braved the stormy northern 
Atlantic to come to the wilderness. They braved 
the Indians to stay. They established their 
homes, their schools, their meeting-houses, their 
government, and dwelt according to the dic- 
tates of their consciences in that freedom which 
they had desired. 

No less for freedom did William Penn and 
his colony of Quakers come to the western hemi- 
sphere. They sought a place where they would 
be given a chance to worship God according 
to their belief. A peaceful sect, they sought 
peace, and they brought into the new country 
standards of living that set their impress upon 
the infant nation. Liberal to others as they 
desired liberality for themselves, they were 
destined to sow seeds of thought that were to 
be harvested in the effects of the Constitution 
of the republic, when it was formulated. 

The Huguenots in the Carolinas, fleeing relig- 



INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 123 

ious persecution, found haven. Lord Baltimore 
established the Maryland colony of English 
Catholics who could not practise their religion 
in the old country. And where the motive 
for the establishment of the colony was not in 
itself purely a question of finding a place of 
religious freedom, the interrelationship of the 
colonies became so close that in time the spirit 
of religious freedom became warp of the fabric 
of the country that was to be the American 
nation. 

Political freedom was promoted, in the be- 
ginning, by the distance of the colonies from 
Europe. France, Spain, and England were 
too far away, and ocean travel too hazardous, 
to make the bond between the mother coun- 
tries and the colonies tight. Men and women 
who had been venturesome enough to cross 
the seas were not of the sort who would be held 
for long by mere traditions of allegiance to 
old lands. Little by little the people of the 
colonies gained larger measures of political 
freedom until the time arrived when the un- 



124 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

just tax imposed by England aroused them 
to revolt. The Boston Tea Party expressed 
the spirit of America. The Declaration of 
Independence voiced America's aspiration and 
America's intention. The War of the Revolu- 
tion settled the right of Americans to their own 
government. The Constitution of the United 
States guaranteed to Americans their rights to 
the enjoyment of that freedom which had been 
the mainspring of the foundation of the nation. 
Gradually the fact that this was a country 
where men could have a share in the govern- 
ment, could speak their minds, could worship 
God in their own way, could work out their 
ideals and ambitions without governmental 
interference as long as these in no way con- 
flicted with the interests of law and order, went 
over the earth. It found its way into those 
countries of Europe where men were eager for 
its coming. The English, after the War of 1812, 
when the United States definitely established 
our standing as a nation, were among the first 
to come as settlers. And from other western 



INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 125 

countries of Europe came other settlers, led 
by the knowledge that here could they enjoy 
individual freedom. 

To America, as to the Promised Land, flocked 
the Irish. Restless under the English yoke, 
denied economic, political, religious, and edu- 
cational liberty by a government of an alien 
neighbor, the Irish people turned westward. 
The famine and the political revolution of 1848 
sent them out from Ireland by the tens of thou- 
sands. To our land they brought a passionate 
yearning for freedom and a passionate gratitude 
to the country which opened it to them; and 
because they were, as a people, gifted with the 
power of expressing their emotions, they spread 
the fame of the United States broadcast over 
the world as a haven for those who sought lib- 
erty. 

After them came the Germans, led by the 
political refugees of that country who had in- 
curred the enmity of Prussia in the Revolution 
of 1848, which had striven to bring some measure 
of freedom to the German people. Denied it at 



126 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

home, hundreds of thousands of Germans came 
to America to find Hberty in their individual 
Hves, to find opportunity. It is these Germans 
and their descendants who, understanding what 
the Prussian yoke means, have become among 
the best of our American citizens. Knowing 
what they escaped, they know what America 
fights against now. 

The third great movement of a people to 
the United States has been the westward coming 
of the Jews. In this country, as in no other, 
they possessed full religious freedom, and to this 
country they have flocked from every land of 
Europe where they had huddled, unwelcome, for 
centuries. Here they have found no opposition 
to their faith. Here they have had full chance 
to worship as they would. For the first time 
in thousands of years the Jew could build his 
temple unhindered. For the first time since 
the Roman had gone into Palestine the Jew 
was a citizen of the land in which he dwelt. 

Then came the peoples of eastern Europe, 
peoples of the vast empire that is called Austria- 



INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 127 

Hungary for lack of a better name. Ruled by 
a man not of their race, a man of one of the 
oldest, most corrupt, and autocratic of the reign- 
ing families of Europe, they were struggling 
upward toward freedom when the growing com- 
mercial dominion of the United States took the 
word to them of our nation's beacon. To us 
they have literally surged. Among us they 
have found the freedom denied their peoples 
at home. 

Another people sought the United States 
to attain freedom. The Poles, oppressed on 
one side by Germany, on another by Austria, 
and on the third by the autocratic government 
of Russia under the Czars, heard the tale of 
the land of liberty, and set out for our shores 
in great hordes. So many have they come that 
Chicago is the second largest Polish city in the 
world, having almost as many Poles as Warsaw; 
and Milwaukee, Buffalo, and other American 
cities attest the surging of the Pole toward a 
land of liberty. 

In fact, there has been no country in Eu- 



128 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

rope where people were dissatisfied with their 
government that has not sent its people to the 
United States. That France has sent the least 
number in proportion to her population has 
been due largely to the fact that the people of 
France had worked out for themselves a genuine 
democracy that satisfied the souls of her sons 
and daughters. 

Through the hundred and forty-one years 
that had elapsed between the calling of the 
Continental Congress and the entrance of the 
United States into war against Germany this 
nation had been solidifying that right of indi- 
vidual freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. 
The war between North and South had been 
fought in defense of the right of a human being 
to freedom as against the right of a State to 
separate itself from the national government. 
The latter issue was lost, not because it was 
wrong, but because it was not as vitally impor- 
tant in the history of civilization as the former. 
For that men and women and children should 
be held in bondage violated the spirit of America; 




An immigrant family qualified to enter the United States 

There has been no country in Europe where people were dissatisfied with their government 
that has not sent its people to the United States 



INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 129 

and the bondage had to be broken. "No gov- 
ernment," as Abraham Lincoln said, "can exist 
half-slave and half -free." 

Some one has called America the melting- 
pot of the nations. If it is, the fire that fuses 
the nationalities which have come to our land 
has been the fire of freedom. 

That is why America's entrance into the 
world war is so much more vitally significant 
than a mere attack in defense of certain viola- 
tions of international law. It is a defense of 
the principle of individuail freedom. Were 
the United States not to oppose a force that 
threatened the freedom of the world, we would 
not be worthy of the trust which the peoples 
of other lands have reposed in us. The Irish, 
the Germans, the Jews, the Slavs who came to 
America would eventually have come in vain. 
For Germany threatens the liberty of all peoples, 
if she wins to victory in Europe. Germany 
stands for all those ideas of government from 
which these peoples fled. Germany stands for 
the suppression of the individual as a political 



130 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

unit. Germany stands for might. Against all 
that we have always fought. If we failed to 
fight now, we would be but deferring the issue. 
And so to-day the United States sends our sol- 
diers to France and our sailors out on the seas 
in defense of that right of mankind which is 
God's gift, no matter how men have tried to 
take it from him, the right of the freedom of 
the individual to live his life as he sees best, 
according only to the dictates of order, of moral 
integrity, of justice, and of righteousness. 



CHAPTER X 

THE UNITED STATES AND INTERNATIONAL PEACE 

International, lasting peace is the third 
great ideal sought by the Republic of the United 
States of America, and it is for the enforcement 
of that kind of peace that the United States 
is fighting. For, unless such peace is assured 
by a decisive victory, the menace of German 
imperialism will so overshadow the world that 
all civilization will be flung back into one long 
effort to keep armed to repel the invader. 

Although other nations have struggled 
toward a standard of international and per- 
manent peace, the United States was one of 
the first great nations to put the theory into 
practice. One of the first instances of this prac- 
tice came at the close of the war between the 
States, when the question of the Alabama 
Claims arose. 

During the war the Confederate States had 

131 



132 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

caused to be built in English ports, with the 
knowledge of the British Government, cruisers 
to damage Federal commerce on the high seas. 
The cruiser Alabama was most active of these, 
and from its prominence gave name to the claim 
which the United States brought against Great 
Britain for the offense against international 
law, particularly since the independence of the 
Confederate States had not been recognized. 
Great Britain had paid no attention to Amer- 
ican remonstrance during the war, but at its 
close requested settlement of the difficulty. 

The United States was equipped for war, 
with a victorious army at command, and with 
a record of two victorious wars over England. 
It was a chance to launch another, had our 
nation been inclined toward militarism. In- 
stead, our country did its part in appointing 
members of a joint high commission, of five 
British and five American statesmen, who met 
in Washington in 1871 and adjusted the dif- 
ficulty. These commissioners made a treaty, 
known as the Treaty of Washington, by which 



INTERNATIONAL PEACE 133 

it was agreed that the claims of either nation 
against the other should be submitted to a 
board of arbitration to be appointed by friendly 
nations. In 1872 this board met at Geneva, 
Switzerland, and decided the claims in favor of 
the United States. Great Britain paid fifteen 
million five hundred thousand dollars for the 
damage done by the cruisers built in her ports; 
but even more important was the precedent 
established by two great nations. 

Through a period in which the world was 
singularly free from great wars the peace ideal 
grew among those countries where the demo- 
cratic form of government was progressing. 
The other nations, striving to maintain that 
elusive standard of political and trade domina- 
tion known as the balance of power, juggled 
with the peace idea, but from a different point 
of view. And it was, strangely enough, the 
Czar of Russia who proposed the establishment 
of an international court for the settling of in- 
ternational disputes. His idea and that of the 
nations who accepted the plan was to keep 



134 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

peace by a settlement of the causes of war, and 
also to reduce the military and naval armaments 
of the great Powers. He also brought forward 
the idea that, if war should come, the conditions 
of warfare should be made less terrible for the 
men who were fighting. He invited the dele- 
gates of the nations of the world to a conference 
at The Hague, in the Netherlands, in May, 
1899. 

The first conference promoted — to all ap- 
pearances — a general good feeling, but did not 
formulate actual rules. The second, called by 
the Czar in 1907, at the request of the govern- 
ment of the United States, and extending from 
June to October of that year, promulgated 
certain rules that were regarded until the be- 
ginning of the war by Germany in 1914 as those 
which would hold all civilized nations. 

The articles of this conference, known as 
The Hague Conventions, provided for: 

I. — The pacific settling of international dis- 
putes; 

n. — The recovery of debts contracted; 



INTERNATIONAL PEACE 135 

III. — Rules for the opening of hostilities; 

IV. — Laws and customs of war on land; 

V. — Rights and duties of neutral states and 
individuals in warfare on land; 

VI. — Treatment of enemy's merchant ships 
at the opening of hostilities; 

VII. — Transformation of merchant ships into 
war vessels; 

VIII. — Placing of submarine mines; 

IX. — Bombardment of undefended towns by 
naval forces; 

X. — Adoption of humane standards author- 
ized by the Geneva Convention to maritime 
warfare; 

XI. — Restrictions on right of capture in 
maritime war; 

XII. — Estabhshment of an international 
prize court; 

XIII. — Rights and duties of neutral states 
in maritime war. 

In addition to the adoption of these thirteen 
articles, which were designed to keep peace or 
to make war less terrible, if it came, the con- 



136 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

ference established a permanent court of arbi- 
tration which has had its place at The Hague, 
and which is known as The Hague Tribunal. 
This court is really a number of judges from 
whom some are selected to try cases of inter- 
national dispute. It is noteworthy that the 
first case laid before The Hague Tribunal for 
settlement was the Pius Fund matter between 
the United States and Mexico. The govern- 
ment of the United States took the dispute to 
The Hague, the first time in history when a 
great nation had appealed to an international 
court for settlement of a claim against a small 
nation. 

Since The Hague Conference the United 
States has concluded about thirty peace treaties 
with as many nations. They are all modelled 
on one general idea which is expressed in the 
opening article of each in this way: 

"The high contracting parties agree that 
all disputes between them, of every nature 
whatsoever, shall, when diplomatic methods 
of adjustment have failed, be referred for in- 



INTERNATIONAL PEACE 137 

vestigation and report to a permanent inter- 
national commission to be constituted" (by the 
contracting parties) ". . . and agree not to de- 
clare war nor to begin hostilities during such 
investigation and before the report be sub- 
mitted." 

Thirty-five nations had accepted this plan 
"in principle" before Germany flung war upon 
the world, and thirty treaties had been signed. 
France, Russia, Great Britain, and Italy had 
signed the treaties. Germany professed ap- 
proval of the plan, but avoided all definite ar- 
rangements, her attitude apparently growing 
out of her dislike of arbitration. 

This opposition to arbitration on Germany's 
part was due to the fact that for many years 
she was actually preparing for war, and be- 
lieved that her best chance of winning it was 
in the unpreparedness of the nations against 
which she intended to wage it. The utterances 
of her statesmen, philosophers, and editors re- 
vealed the German official attitude of mind. 
There can be no doubt but that Germany de- 



138 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

sired to keep the world lulled in a false security 
until she had made ready to strike the blow 
against world peace. Nothing else explains 
her refusal to bind herself with the terms that 
other nations accepted in the hope that wars 
were becoming things of the past. 

Just before the United States was forced 
into the breaking off of diplomatic relations 
with Germany the President of the country 
went before the Senate to set forth the prin- 
ciples which should govern our nation in the 
making of any peace with which we would as- 
sociate ourselves. The principles which he set 
forth were: 

I. — An equality of rights between nations, 
to be based on justice and not on the old prin- 
ciple of balance of power; 

II. — Recognition of the principle that gov- 
ernments derive their just powers from the 
consent of the governed; 

III. — The right of all great peoples to have 
a direct outlet to the sea, either by territorial 
acquisition or by neutralization; 



INTERNATIONAL PEACE 139 

IV. — The freedom of the seas; 

V. — The Hmitations of armaments on land 
and sea; 

VI. — Refusal to permit any nation to ex- 
tend its policy over any other nation or people; 

VII. — A concert of nations to guarantee 
peace and the rights of all nations, no entan- 
gling alliances creating a competition for power, 
but a league for the enforcement of interna- 
tional peace. 

"These are American principles, American 
policies," the President stated. "They are also 
the principles of forward-looking men and 
women everywhere, of every modern nation, 
and of every enlightened community." 

To the very last, until the action of Germany 
in restricting the freedom of the seas for which 
the United States had fought and won a war in 
days when she was ill-prepared for any conflict, 
our country had stood out for peace. Only 
when our vital rights were threatened, our vital 
principles violated, did war come. And, when 
it came the United States entered into the 



140 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

conflict, not in hot passion, but with the high 
purpose of estabHshing a real peace that cannot 
be broken by any one vandal nation. 

The kind of peace which is the ideal of the 
United States, and the one toward which we 
are now fighting, is not to be the sort which 
may be patched up over a council-table for a 
brief space. There is only one way of curing 
a cancer of the human body. It must be cut 
out. And so it is with the world. The only 
way to cure the world of war is to cut out the 
cancer of militarism. The only way to cut it 
out is to defeat the armies of militarism. 

The United States and the Allies are not 
fighting to impose on Germany and her fellow 
fighters any particular form of government; 
but they are fighting to defeat that form of 
government which has precipitated the war, 
the so-called Junker policy of the German Em- 
pire. The Junker, who is a member of the Prus- 
sian nobility and a man devoted to militarism, 
has been the instrument of war, forcing it on 
the world that Germany, which for him means 



INTERNATIONAL PEACE 141 

only a certain small class of rulers in Prussia 
headed by the Kaiser, shall be rich and power- 
ful over all the earth. It is to end his reign 
upon earth that hundreds of thousands of men 
are dying on the fields of France and Flanders. 
It is to end that policy of Germany which aims 
to keep men always at war that we are warring. 
For, if Germany is not totally defeated, every 
country in the world will have to build up a 
military machine of the same kind as Germany's 
in order to be ready to fight her when she makes 
up her mind to invade their territories; and 
no one will know when she might do that. The 
policy of Germany will threaten every democ- 
racy in the world; for democracies cannot 
exist while military establishments continue. 
Nothing but a total, annihilating defeat of 
Germany in this war will make the world *'safe 
for democracy" and sure for peace. 

When the war is won the United States 
will, it is sure, insist upon a just peace that 
will insure these ideals, a peace that will make 
impossible another such outrage as the inva- 



142 MY COUNTRY'S PART 

sion of Belgium, another Lusitania outrage, an- 
other defiance of all civilized standards, a peace 
that will remove militarism, make free the seas, 
and give to the individual that freedom that 
has made the United States the haven of the 
whole world. 



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